Internationalization and Digitalization in Engineering Education

Digital, virtual and E-learning elements have increasingly become a part in higher education and, most recently, the high potential of digitalization for processes of strategic internationalization of higher education institutions is coming into focus. The collaborative project of three German universities, XYZ, is working on strategies for the internationalization and virtualization of engineering education. While these topics used to be different key areas of the project, a combination of both distinguished itself as a potential new working field. This paper introduces two pilot concepts that were implemented and evaluated at the universities Y and Z which both aim at the complementation of incoming students’ experiences in Germany by digital means. At Y, a transnational online class explores means of preparing degree-mobile engineering students from all over the world for their master’s studies in Germany. At Z, an online course was designed to accompany a summer school research exchange for US-American engineering students in order to prolong their short-term mobility by digital elements. These pilot projects were well-accepted by students and faculty at both universities and their evaluations between 2014 and 2017 have revealed valuable results for further optimization. This paper presents the results and discusses future potential.