Improving Academic Teaching and Internalisation through Enhanced Competences of University Teachers (IMPACT)

Project introduction and background information

Aim of IMPACT,  a 2 year Erasmus+ project that runs until September 2022, is to improve internationalization and student learning through enhancing competences of university teachers of the universities of Bratislava and Brno.  Outcomes of the project are:

  • a curriculum of a professional development courses supporting academics to teach international students;
  • a five day academic writing course for humanities and social science teachers;
  • a dedicated open access web portal showcasing good teaching practice at the university level;
  • a study evaluating the outcomes from two newly introduced courses, including how participant ability to reflect impacts their teaching and student learning;
  • a study exploring the role of trust in facilitating the integration of knowledge from professional development courses into participant practice;
  • A strategic cooperation plan for the professionalization of higher education teaching at the national and international levels.

Open access web portal

LDE CEL has had the lead in designing, developing and implementing the open-access portal. The purpose of this portal is to showcase examples of good practice related to the internationalisation of courses in various disciplines such as the humanities, social sciences as well as in medicine. These examples reflect efforts to enhance the learning of international students, mixed groups of international and domestic students, and domestic students via internationalisation at their home institutions. They all use student-centred learning and, more specifically, the method of peer learning.

The examples were collated as part of the international collaborative project ‘Improving Academic Teaching and Internationalisation through Enhanced Competences of University Teachers’ (IMPACT). Some of these are innovations of student learning designed and implemented by teacher contributors of the teaching development course ‘Effective Teaching for Internationalisation’. Other contributions have been selected following a call for best practice methods used in Europe to facilitate the internationalization of courses, which was circulated via the European Consortium for Political Research and its ‘Teaching and Learning Politics’ standing group.

We hope these examples of good practices are used to inform and inspire other teachers to internationalise their undergraduate and graduate level courses in order to make good use of diverse knowledge, skills and experiences of students to benefit student learning.

Partners:

Comenius University, Bratislava 
Masaryk University, Brno
Central European University, Budapest, Budapest
European Consortium for Political Research, UK

This open-access portal has been co-funded by the European Union as part of the Erasmus+ project.