A modern university education in the sciences is nowadays no longer conceivable without international components. This includes to jointly study with foreign students at the home university, study stays abroad, presenting research findings at international conferences or in scientific journals, or cooperations with international partners during the Master and PhD thesis.
To provide our students with such training a profound change in the way courses are conducted is required. English-language lectures and seminars that can be followed outside of the classroom and detached from specific time slots must be two very important elements in the strategy of internationalization of universities.
Chemistry has always been an international science, being especially evident this year with the International Year of Chemistry that has been declared by the UNESCO: All over the world exist very similar ideas what content should be taught in a chemistry course. Laboratories differ at most in the size of the flasks that will be used, consequently, moving to a foreign working group generally poses no problems. However, it is expected that a smooth communication with the foreign students is possible, and it is generally accepted that English at a high level is the way to do it. This becomes increasingly apparent already in the undergraduate curricula: foreign universities are threatening the termination of partnership with German universities if their students are not offered a sufficient range of courses given in English during their semester abroad.
Also for students from non-English speaking countries a professional training in English - even if they are planning to never go abroad to a foreign language speaking country - is essential. Let me explain that with the following example: Recently I was invited at a large Swiss pharmaceutical company for a project meeting. Besides me, only three German employees of the company were attending. After we had a little informal chat - in German of course - I was about to begin to presenting our project. My industrial colleagues told me that from now on everything we did was required to be in English, and also everything must be recorded in English, so that at a later stage possibly others - not German-speaking employees - could understand the project. Consequently, our students need to consciously work on their English skills, the biggest lie that can be found usually in the CVs of non-native English graduates, is the phrase "fluent in spoken and written English.
Unquestionably, the best lectures and seminars are the ones you can see live in the lecture hall. Interaction with faculty and fellow students cannot be replaced by anything, which is especially true in my field of chemistry, in which the courses are still reasonable in size. However, calling for the internationalization of education an alternative and flexible approach is needed to conduct courses. Therefore students should have the opportunity to take lectures from their home university from a distance during their stay abroad. The simplest way to achieve this is to record lectures on video and make these available online for the students at any time. Tutorials and office hours can then be easily organized by email and Skype. But even for those students who can listen to the lecture in the lecture hall, video recordings provide an important opportunity to repeat the content again in detail by viewing these. Even more attractive, though more difficult to realize, is a direct live transmission of a course: this way you can create joint courses between two or more universities.
Since 2007 I am coordinating the transatlantic degree program EUCHEMUSA between two Ameri
can universities, University of Kansas and University of Arkansas (Fayetteville), Dublin City University, Ireland, and the University of Regensburg. This program is generously funded within the Atlantis program of the European Union and the Department of Education (USA). Students from our American partners spend a year at the two European partners (6 months each), the students of Dublin and Regensburg spend one year at one of the American partners. At the end of the program, students receive both a bachelor's degree from one of the European and one of the American Universities, a so-called dual degree. Within this program, we have recorded some lectures on video: one of those is the course Advanced Organic Synthesis, spanning four lecture hours and a two-hour tutorial per week. This way, students of each partner institution will be given the opportunity to take this course whereever they are, receiving full credit for their degree program.
