"The Virtual Academy is valuable for doing work in advance to face-to-face interaction. Students get to know each other and discover similarities as well as differences in their experiences as students. We also are able to do more background work, making the team interactions richer and more productive. The Virtual Academy allows us to have much more interaction than we would have the time or financial resources to accomplish otherwise."
"The course sensitized me to compare different landscape arcitectural frameworks, to look at them from different prespectives and to understand them holistically. Unexpectedly, I also gained a deeper understanding of landscape-related strategies in Germany. For example, comparing the different countries showed me that applied measures often have a historical origin. What I liked most was when someone shared informal details such as what they experienced at work or in their studies. I would recommend an international collaborative course to anyone who wants to think outside the box and develop their English and especially their communication skills."
"Of course, some aspects are not comparable with a face-to-face event, but there are also clear advantages: For example, we save ourselves a very long journey and costs. These are actually reasons why some students are able to participate at all. That's particularly valuable. The special challenge for a spatial planning discipline such as landscape architecture will be to create a similar virtual immersion effect for the German participants in the following workshop phase in a project area in the USA and to implement cooperative planning in an exclusively virtual environment. The incentive for this is that in the future this format will also enable international experiences for students who cannot or do not want to undertake long-distance travel."
"Although all participants had the same technical components, the spatial distance is naturally a particular challenge with a technical topic. But the students got involved with this unusual situation very well and have already come up with exciting results. One might have suspected that communication would be made more difficult, but it worked very well among the students."
"In the beginning, I was worried about the language difference, but I was surprised of how well the students and the instructors dominated the English language. I was also surprised that despite being on a different continent, the embedded applications that the students were developing could also apply to the U.S. I would recommend that other students enroll in international collaboration courses because I feel that it will help prepare them for the global business world where it is common to have to work with teams that are located in different countries."
"As part of the cooperation between Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences and SUNY, we as teachers had the opportunity to teach the subject of IoT jointly this semester. Through the combination of lectures by teachers from both sides and practical programming tasks, the students themselves approached the topic of IoT in a practical way. In addition, we were able to give the students a first opportunity to present and also to practice interaction with international students. This is a great experience for their future professional career! For us teachers it was interesting how the culture influences the teaching, e.g. in the experimental design."
"The virtual international course helped me meet new people and broaden my horizons. Through collaboration, I learned new ways of thinking which was very inspiring. I think that a pure theory course is not that effective, but when you experiment with other students, present your results in the course and explain the procedure, it increases the learning process. This activity has encouraged me to learn more about the German culture, education system, and the prevailing industry there, and to travel to Germany to see my new classmates."
"The joint course is a nice change from everyday study, especially in times of Corona. In addition, learning other ways of working is good preparation for our later professional lifes, where we will certainly often work in an international composition."
"Starting my studies, I was wondering what it would be like to work in the future with colleagues or business partners from other countries while speaking English. Getting to be a part of the COIL-project gave me a taste of what that would be like. At the end of our groupwork we all agreed on how much fun we had getting to know each other. We really liked working together and have invited each other to visit our cities and to spend some time together one day."