Teaching Formats

When you are planning a teaching project, it is important to agree on the various possibilities for didactic design. When doing so, you should be aware of and address any cultural differences that may exist in terms of student expectations.

• Format: Discuss ideas on how to teach the course content. Online-based teaching can be supplemented by individual classroom or hybrid components or guest lectures as needed. Partners should also discuss the relative proportions of synchronous and asynchronous phases.
• Teaching and mentoring: Depending on whether the partners are each responsible for their own teaching content and packages in the overall project, or whether new offerings are developed completely collaboratively, you must also address the question of how to divide up teaching and student support. This can be assigned based on content, or, alternatively, each partner can be responsible for the students at their own institution.
• Virtual exchange: In international teaching formats, joint activities and direct collaboration between students provide crucial added value. This can be done in both synchronous and asynchronous phases. In internationally mixed groups, students can learn from each other and learn to work together in intercultural teams. Try to incorporate tasks which are designed to enable students to achieve maximum benefit from working together. Open, problem-based tasks and projects are particularly suitable for this. Gamification and inquiry-based learning also offer significant potential.
• Intercultural communication: The intercultural dimension is not only relevant for the cooperation between the partners but also for students. It provides an important enrichment to international digital teaching and strengthens the intercultural competence of students. However, students do not “automatically” obtain this competence merely through their participation in the course. It results from conscious and active reflection. Therefore, we recommend actively considering this dimension during the didactic conception of the course.
• Student support: Together with your partner(s), discuss the ways in which students will be mentored and supported and how existing practices can be adapted to different group sizes and different levels of prior knowledge. Measures such as subtitles for videos can help students understand content more easily.
• Evaluation: give students the opportunity to provide feedback and evaluate the course they have just completed. If necessary, you discuss these results afterwards in the consortium.

• Tools: Educational technologies can enrich teaching, and there are a number of tools you can use. The Center for Learning and Innovation at the FernUniversität (ZLI) provides an overview of the various tools – some of which can also be used in an international context – and their application scenarios in its Tool Guide (PDF 444 KB; in German). Nevertheless, in an international consortium there may be compatibility problems with the application of these tools, and also certain regulations (e.g., in the use of student data) that need to be taken into account. The ZLI website (in German) provides a wealth of information about questions of media didactic design.
• Learning Management Systems (LMS): Institutions often use a number of different LMSs. So when it comes to deciding which LMS to use, the decision should be based on the features required for teaching as well as accessibility to external students. The FernUniversität operates the Open Moodle platform (in German), which is freely accessible and ideal for collaboration with international partners.