International Study Project

2020-12-11

Elfi Herrmann with students at the graduation ceremony in May 2019.

In professional life, it is often the case that groups from different cultures and countries meet and work together on international projects. This is where some barriers and obstacles reveal themselves, among other things in language and communication. The bbw Hochschule has students of many nationalities and attaches great importance to bringing students and their different cultures together.

To prevent some of these barriers among our students, our lecturer Elfi Herrmann has created a unique international project within her courses via WebEx. In an online event, Ms. Herrmann brought together the international courses "Technical English" and "Technical German" and had the students work together on a case study on "Business Strategy", which was about (inter-)cultural management. A project that was very well appreciated by the students: " I highly recommend continuing such projects in future classes, since they offer an excellent preparation for all the challenges which may occur when working with people from different nations."

In teams, the students created a problem analysis and developed solution strategies. The goal of the international project work was to exchange ideas among each other and to gain experience of what it means to work together in an international team, as well as to build up an international awareness of problems and to develop solution strategies.

In a lively confusion of languages, the students communicated with each other and dealt intensively with the topic. It was not important whether the (foreign) language was used grammatically correctly or incorrectly, it should primarily serve the purpose of communication and understanding. Thus, the students no longer thought about "mistakes", but actively communicated and were particularly carefree about the matter. After the project, the students wrote reports on the topic "Experience with international project work".

One of the students gave the following feedback in his evaluation: " Throughout all the groups it was noticeable how the students considered the cultural differences as a positive feature of living in a globalized world. The groups worked together as teams and each of them presented their results in an appropriate way. Technical difficulties and language barriers did not stop the groups from creating brilliant ideas. To me, the project proved in a very special way how cultural differences are a huge enrichment in our modern world, as long as people treat each other with great respect." A nice conclusion!

You can find the exciting evaluations below in the download area.