Double degree Master's programme – Internationalising Practice in Civil Engineering

Overview

The project ‘I_PaCE: Double Degree in Master's Programmes - Internationalising Practice in Civil Engineering’ is developing viable options for the internationalisation of consecutive Master's programmes. HSB is pioneering this development with the Master's degree programme ‘Civil Engineering - Sustainable Planning and Building M.Sc.’, which cooperates with the Master's degree programmes ‘Construction Engineering’ at the Bragança Polytechnic Institute (IPB) in Portugal and ‘Structural Design or Construction Management’ at the Cracow University of Technology (CUT) in Poland.

The partners are further developing their curricula through joint attractive and quality-assured internationalised courses. These will address current topics and trends in the construction industry and teach relevant future-oriented skills, thus forming the foundation for the realisation of the double degree Master's programme.

While physical semester or short-term mobility is prioritised, the Master's degree programme should also be able to be completed purely virtually. The following components will be integrated to achieve the objectives:

• joint innovative English-language teaching and learning formats, virtual, hybrid and face-to-face;
• challenge-based learning module for working on current problems of the practice partners;
• Specialist specialisation and expansion in line with the expertise of the participating universities.

The latter makes it possible to include further university partners in the programme in the future.

For HSB, this is a trend-setting further development of its internationalisation strategy. Although the international nature of the courses on offer has been a central element of HSB's profile and a recognised strategic core of university development for a good 30 years, these Master's degree programmes in all subject areas are primarily regionally oriented and are only integrated into international university cooperation to a limited extent. Internationality has so far focused on the achelor degree programmes and is characterised by strong physical semester mobility, for which numerous university partnerships and highly developed service structures have been established.

At the level of university strategy, I_PaCE is THE pilot project for the Strategy and University Planning Unit for the further development of internationalisation and thus an integral part of university development. In this way, the HSB ensures from the outset that

• the relevant administrative units are involved;
• the results are integrated into the quality assurance control cycles;
• the concepts for the individual modules, as well as the overall concept for the double degree, serve as a blueprint for the Master's programmes of all faculties at HSB.