Open Access

Die Reihe Wissenschaft kommunizieren und mediengerecht posi­tio­nie­ren verschafft Ihnen einen kompakten Überblick über die Grundlagen, Werkzeuge und Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten, um wissenschaftliche Themen gezielt in die Öffentlichkeit sowie in spezifische Zielgruppen hineintragen zu können.

This paper reports on a short-term study abroad program which used cooperative international research projects to enhance the program experience. Both individualized small group research projects and a joint multinational public opinion survey were integrated into the program. The projects were designed to force the program participants to systematically confront key issues associated with the International Finance theme of the program before, during, and after the off-campus period. Thus, the projects served to prepare the program participants for the program, enhance the off-campus period, and provide a lens through which the participant could reflect on their experiences. While this paper reports the experience primarily from the U.S. university group’s perspective, the impact and integration at the other partner schools is discussed. The authors wish to express their gratitude to everyone who supported the effort at each stage of the process and at each location involved in the program.

"Diffusion - create clarity, overcome barriers, be heard" is the title of this year's annual report. It shows how the university is searching for answers to the multilayered, complex questions of our time. Whether digitalisation, climate change or social responsibility - scientists are getting through their subject areas and in the end they have to make their findings heard.

"Durchdringen - Klarheit schaffen, Barrieren überwinden, Gehör finden" lautet diesmal das Motto des Jahresberichts. Er zeigt, wie die Hochschule nach Antworten auf die vielschichtigen, komplexen Fragen der Zeit sucht. Ob Digitalisierung, Klimawandel oder gesellschaftliche Verantwortung - Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler durchdringen ihre Themengebiete, und sie müssen am Ende mit ihren Erkenntnissen Gehör finden.

Digital transformation in Higher Education and Science is a mission-critical demand to prepare educational institutions for their future competition on the international market. In many cases, the digitization goes along with the search for and acquisition of new software. For easily exchangeable software, wrong product decisions, in the worst case, lead to calculable financial losses. However, if a planned software requires a lot of technological adjustments and is to be applied as central component of a business- and/or security-critical environment, wrong decisions during the software acquisition process might lead to hardly calculable damage. Questions arising are how to decide for a product and how many resources should be invested for the acquisition process. We planned to apply a commercial Business Support System, which should replace the currently used in-house developed software. Our goals were the increase of our university’s level of data security, to ease the interaction between stakeholders, to eliminate media discontinuities, to improve the process management and transparency, and to reduce the execution time of automated processes. Alongside with the introduction of the electronic case file, our agenda stipulates the digitization (and automation) of administrative university processes, especially, but not limited to, the student self-service and the administrative student life cycle. Usual tools and practices, commonly applied to (simple) software acquisition, failed in our scenario. With the case study introduced in this paper, we address all persons, involved within software acquisition processes: From our experiences, we strongly recommend to place greater value on an exhaustively completed acquisition process, than on short-termed economic advantages.

In this contribution we present the concept for creating an “International Chair” position at a German University of Applied Sciences and our experiences in its first implementation. Our primary goal was to increase the diversity of the university’s teaching personalities and enrich student education by including content, methods, examples and experiences from other cultures. This gives students an international and intercultural learning experience that is otherwise only acquired through studying abroad. We conclude that the International Chair is a valuable and powerful university tool for increasing international exposure to the departments, their staff and students.

This Business English course in entrepreneurship goes beyond communicative language instruction and offers a course designed to introduce students to innovative thinking, entrepreneurship and sustainable business practices. About 120 students in their first year are enrolled as part of the required foreign language module in Business Management (B.Sc.). Each week students learn new concepts and terminology in sustainable business practices while applying the material in a simulation task-based course using English as a lingua franca. It prepares students to work in an international context while offering online components for autonomous learning. This 12-14 week course is designed in a student-centered and blended learning format with a flipped classroom approach. Through a grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research the “work&study project” will offer additional online materials by developing new educational apps to enhance autonomous language learning and making the app content available under the Creative Commons license. The research project focuses on offering new learning environments to enhance the opportunities for non-traditional students enrolled at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. This paper will focus on the development of the first apps and results of the first testing phase. It shows how game-based learning and elements of gamification were added for educational purposes to enhance teaching and learning processes that were already well established.