Enhancing Teaching Practice in Higher Education

In Holger Kusse’s contribution, Intercultural Teaching and Learning in Foreign Language Education. Using the Example of Teaching Russian, language learning is considered from an intercultural point of view. The different factors, influences and challenges of intercultural didactics in foreign language teaching are discussed. At the end, Kusse reflects on these considerations against the background of this specific project, which makes theoretical assumptions applicable.

Maureen Royce, Madeleine Stevens, Joshi Jariwala and David Soehren discuss in their contribution, Perspectives of Authentic Assessment and Professional Practice Interventions in Teaching and Learning in UK Higher Education, the general principles of curriculum development and assessment, considering the requirements of professional practice. Their observations are then aligned with a specific module in human resource management and the authors show how the principles are implemented in this case.

Whereas Royce, Stevens, Jariwala and Soehren provided an example from their home university, Liverpool John Moores University, Aurora Ricci takes the University of Bologna as a model. She returns to the pandemic as a call for renewal in The Innovation of Learning and Teaching Practices in Higher Education: A Methodological Focus on the University of Bologna’s Model. Here, she presents learner- and teacher-focused activities to face the challenge of remote learning and illustrates them with a case study and quantitative, evaluative data.

Olga Mennecke returns the focus to language learning, but the situation caused by Covid-19 is also a key factor in her considerations. As language learning is associated with a face-to-face arrangement, she discusses the factors influencing students’ motivation in her contribution, Contentualizing Students’ Motivation in Online Language Courses, and gives examples of how to deal with distance language learning.

In her contribution, New Prospects in Higher Education: Hybrid Learning Environments and Creative Teaching, Susana Gonçalves takes general reflections on societal change and the changes caused by the pandemic as a starting point to reflect on the factor of creativity in higher education and hybrid teaching.

Tatiana Tregubova, Irina Ainoutdinova and Vadim Kozlov present a deep insight into foreign language learning and teaching. After introducing the history and variety of methods, they pursue the Transformation from Conventional Methods to Web-based Technologies: Enhancing FLT/FLL Practices in Russian Universities, again seeing Covid-19 as an impetus. The authors discuss methods and influencing factors, and also introduce the necessary first steps for establishing efficient digital methods in foreign language teaching and learning.

The perspective in the contribution from Sergei Vasin, Konstantin Korolev, Tatiana Razuvaeva is, on the one hand, broader, as they look into general teaching and learning strategies and the systematic transformation needed to change those. But Enhancing Teaching Practice in HEIs through the Development of University Learning and Teaching Strategy is, on the other hand, a microscopic view, as the authors examine the case of Penza State University, one of the project universities.

Three contributions from China complete the volume. In Improving Teaching Practice in Higher Education from the Perspective of Learning Science, Juan Fu develops a teaching system in higher education against the background of higher education policy in China in accordance with the findings of learning psychology. New technologies in teaching, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), are also taken into account.

Starting from the concept of respect, Tang Xueming describes the requirements for English teachers who should also provide moral education at the same time. Effective Ways of Integrating Moral Education into College English Teaching focuses on this practice at the college level.

The last contribution in the volume, The Present Situation, Dilemma and Path of Internationalization of Higher Education in the Central Region of China – Taking S University as an Example, by Qin Yuan and Yigang Peng, can be seen as a kind of project summary from a Chinese perspective. It deals with the internationalization of universities, one of the major goals of the project. The authors describe the internationalization strategies of one university against the background of regional differences in internationalization at Chinese universities.