Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg

01/15/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 01/16/2026 01:14

A different kind of English course: TUBAF students learn digitally, internationally and collaboratively

The module Professional Communication prepares students for the challenges of international collaboration in specialised English. Students work online on a joint task and develop future skills in the process. They present their results online - in English, of course! Thanks to new funding from the "Innovation in University Teaching" foundation, even more students will be benefiting from the collaborative English courses at TU Bergakademie Freiberg.

The particular challenge of this English course: as students have different mother tongues, there is no possibility of "switching" to a common native language. This makes the learning task both challenging and rewarding for the students. "As a lingua franca, English has become an indispensable part of working life and science. When teams work together across language barriers, they often do so remotely and in a language that is a foreign language for most of them. That's why we have reorganised the Professional Communication module: international, interdisciplinary and digital," says Darlene Kilian, English teacher and project manager at TU Bergakademie Freiberg. Together with her colleague Mark Jacob and lecturers at the Wiesbaden Business School and the Silesian University of Technology, she has already led several 'Collaborative Online International Learning' (COIL) programmes.

Future skills in every degree programme

TU Bergakademie Freiberg is now making this form of collaboration, which has been tried and tested in previous courses, available to even more students as a virtual international experience: In the new project, at least one "Collaborative Online International Learning" course is included in the English language curriculum of every degree programme. Students acquire important soft skills for their studies and jobs.

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They learn to work together remotely, that is with a time delay, and use helpful tools to do so. They find their role in an intercultural group and organise, plan and delegate an international remote team. And they guide other learners, use their language skills and share their expertise with students from other subjects.

Internationalising teaching

In addition to international collaboration opportunities for the majority of TUBAF students, the "COIL-Eng Project" also provides mentoring, workshops and a handbook of best practices and COIL frameworks for TUBAF faculty interested in expanding their own courses to include collaborative international online learning through TUBAF's partnerships and alliances. "In this way, we aim to strengthen TUBAF's existing university partnerships while offering students and faculty the opportunity to connect, share, collaborate and learn from each other across borders while gaining important future skills," says Kilian.

Innovation potential in teaching: Four TUBAF projects successful

In "Freiraum", the Innovation in University Teaching Foundation regularly funds projects that demonstrate high innovation potential for university teaching. TU Bergakademie Freiberg is being funded with four applications in the current call for proposals.

  • Empowering teaching in STEM under psychological stress, Dr Kristina Wopat
  • Interactive visualisation of knowledge networking, Dr Ines Aubel
  • Virtual interactive molecule simulation, Dr Conrad Hübler
  • COIL-Eng, Darlene Kilian
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15. January 2026
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Darlene Kilian
EURECA-PRO - English staff training, English for Specific Purposes, Prüferstraße 2, Room 2.410, 09599 Freiberg
Darlene-Ann.Kilian[at] iuz.tu-freiberg.de +49 3731 39-3307
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Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg published this content on January 15, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on January 16, 2026 at 07:14 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]