The university-course: internet- and projectcompetence

Tools

Basic global English

Aims

Developing communication-skills in order to enhance the flow of information between young people (students), world wide. The communication should focus on relevant topics (mainly economics) so the participants enhance their knowledge-level. Especially they have to focus on problems that mankind is facing, like poverty (see the UN-Millenium development goals). The target is to build a world-wide network (think tank) including young people (especially students) searching for solutions for crucial mankind-problems.

Human resources in education

Facing mankind's problems it is opportune to mobilize as many intellectual resources as possible in order to resolve the emerging troubles. The students have to be trained to construct pertinent knowledge together (for example using the method Learning by teaching). Students can be trained in constructing knowledge outside the classroom too. They have to adopt following attitudes:

Be aware that they are bearing resources
Be aware that they have to increase their own resources in order to be more attractive inside the community
Be aware that they can increase their own resources if they communicate
Be aware that they can increase their own resources if they share their knowledge with other people
Ability to identify resource from other community members and to make this resource available for all the group
Ability to search for pertinent resources outside the group
Ability to connect people looking for resources with people proposing resources
Ability to organize collective thinking in networks

Structure of the ipc-course

Module: 6 month – 130 work hours – little teams (max. 8 persons) work on a topic they have choose for themselves – the results of their research were uploaded on individual homepages
Current number of participants: approximately 100 students are involved each semester worldwide (Germany, USA, Bulgaria, Russia, Turkey).
Partnership: with universities in Germany (Augsburg, Virtual Bavarian University), in Turkey, Bulgaria and Russia.
Staff: The students were trained by a professor and by tutors. Tutors are students who have achieved the module during former terms. Currently approximately 10 tutors are in charge.