The FINANCIAL — Professor Dr. Hannes Hofstadler and seven students from Upper Austrian University will visit Caucasus University in June. They will stay in Tbilisi for one week. Professor (FH) Dr. Hannes Hofstadler, will give some lecturers in the Caucasus University. Upper Austria University of Applied Science President Dr. Gerald Reisinger arrived in Georgia to sign a contract with Caucasus University.
“Relationship between our universities started 3 years ago, with two students exchange per semester and now we are going up to 10 students. It’s easy for students because we have English programmes in Upper Austria, so they can attend all the lecturers that are offered there. Beneath that I hope that they will learn a little bit of German so that they could more deeply understand of the Austrian culture. They need it for establishing contacts with the social network there,” Dr. Reisinger said.
“It was kind of a testing period until now, how would students like and how would they feel in different countries. It went pretty well and now we put it all more in formal base, that’s why we are signing this contract. By the way, we are dealing with the marketing and sales department, where students exchange happens in terms of marketing and sales programmes. There will be teachers exchange as well in the nearby future. We had discussions, in exchanging teachers and exchanging students in the field of IT as well,” Dr. Reisinger said.
“Austrian economy is very interested to work on its business in this area and they need young students to have a deep cultural understanding of the countries where they are working and doing businesses and vice versa of course. I think your companies as well are going to make businesses in Europe and there are young people who can work and live in both cultures without any borders,” Dr. Reisinger said.
“I think cultural understanding is the most important thing that we can give to our students. Students are learning language, getting information’s about business about marketing. We hope that our students will visit Georgia for at least one semester. What we are doing now is kind of an ice braking to make a start with this group,” Dr. Reisinger says.
“Austria has traditional orientation to Eastern States. It is a tradition for the Austrian companies to make business here, but we have a kind of a spot in the area of Caucasus. And we try to change that. Students are young, they are interested, they love Eastern European countries and culture and I am sure they will like Georgia too,” Dr. Reisinger says.
Accordingly to its officials, the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences is the largest university of applied sciences in Austria and is an integral part of the tertiary education system.
The organization is defined by the requirements of regional scientific and research needs. The university is ambitiously striving to secure a leading position in central Europe with its selected fields of competence. The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences is a recognized research partner for industry having already achieved nationwide status and is actively involved in co-operations on an international basis
“The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, in German Fachhochschule Oberoesterreich, is a vocationally-oriented higher education institution which provides academic programmes at university level to over 4000 students. We are a decentralized institution, comprising four schools in four different towns of the region of Upper Austria: Hagenberg, Linz, Steyr and Wels. Each school focuses on different fields of study” University officials note.
“As a result of the Bologna process, most of our programmes have been switched to the Bachelor/Master system in the last couple of years. We now offer more than 40 programmes in total at Bachelor and Master Level,” Upper Austria University notes.
“Students are strictly oriented on the work they are doing. Generally, universities just give them an academic degree on a very general level. One difference in Austrian education is that we call it a dual system, nearly 50 percent of my students are working part time and they study later. After that we have a classical PHD programmes again with the same system,” Dr. Reisinger says.
Accordingly to Professor (FH) Dr. Hannes Hofstadler contract that they signed with Caucasus University is a double degree agreement.
“The idea is to offer the better students from both sides an opportunity to show that they performed better then average and they have to study quite hard. An idea is really to offer the incentives to those who want to do more both on the Georgian and the Austrian side. We started with this simple student exchange contract. Then we moved to mutual teaching and now we are taking the next step. We are very confident, otherwise we wouldn’t have concluded the double degree agreement, because that needs an organizational stability, it means trusts in both sides management, so its a signal that we now reached the platform which is quite stable to construct a house on it,” Prof. Hofstadler says.
“We are now discussing the IT exchange programme, we discusses some issues in the school of humanities of Caucasus University. Simple cooperation like that we have in the other two schools so student exchanges, lecturers exchange, but for instance in the school of Social welfare we have to work on researches as well and that’s a plan. New things should be established step by step,” Hofstadler said.
