Internationalization at Home by Bringing English into the Lecture Hall

The engineering department of the Hochschule Bonn Rhein Sieg (University of Applied Sciences) wished to significantly increase the number of English-language courses offered for incoming students, since this would be the basis for participating in international student exchange and build up partnerships with universities abroad. But for lecturers it is a high effort besides their daily work, to shift the scripts and presentation to English; using the correct technical terms. Hence, skilled student assistants were recruited to translate the learning material for more than 20 courses with the help of the artificial intelligence-based translation tool “deep L”, to support the lecturers. The aim was to either switch a full course into English or to offer a mixed language teaching course, where international students have access to the complete material in English and join in exercises in English, while the lecture itself will be held in German. Besides enabling international exchange, switching the language to English in a greater number of modules shall help to promote technical language competencies of the German students. The resulting teaching materials already have been used in international cooperations.