Lectures at ICMS

Report by Jasmin M.

Lecturers

One of the main reasons why I chose ICMS was that ICMS is a university with an excellent reputation and lecturers with command skills and professional practice.
All lecturers of my courses have been working for years and were adept in their subject, so they were able to bring the learning objectives with different examples of their experiences across. The lecturers were in the classrooms 15 minutes before classes and stayed 15 minutes after classes. During that time they were available for students, if they had any questions concerning the learning content, lectures or assessments.

All of my lecturers were highly skilled, very supportive, friendly and helpful. I have chosen 4 courses, therefore I had 1 lecture every week for 90 minutes and one tutorial also 90 minutes. In the lectures we learned a lot of theory and during the tutorials we had the opportunity to put this theory into practice and deepen our knowledge. Most of the tutors and lecturers used Power Point presentations, flip charts and boards in lectures as well as in tutorials.

Courses

The day before classes, the lecturers and tutors usually upload the learning content in Moodle (a website, where you can login). Depending on your needs, you can either print it out or follow it on the computer during the lecture. Furthermore, each lecture was based on a textbook, so we had one textbook for each lecture. We often had to read different topics in the textbooks as kind of homework, to be prepared for the lectures or tutorials.

Exams and students

Given that, it could be of great value to buy the textbooks, even though they are quite expensive. Other possibilities would be to buy the digital version of the book, which is a little bit cheaper or read the textbooks in the library for free. But unfortunately it was not allowed to take some of the books out of the library. The average class size was between 25 and 30 students, which enabled lecturers to elaborate on explicit questions of every student. ICMS is a very international college with students from different countries all over the world. I really enjoyed being part of this multicultural environment and made new friends from different countries in every course. That was a great opportunity to get to know foreign cultures, learn about different ways of life and see some things from a different angle. There was no space for stereotypes or prejudice.