From 23 till 24 of April two European experts, Katharina Hutter (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany) and Daphne Laing (University of Wolverhampton, UK) visited Ural State University of Railway Transport.
They came in the framework of REMARK project: Retraining courses in intercultural marketing, which is realized under the TEMPUS patronage. USURT has been working on this project for 2 years now. Five lecturers from four departments worked side by side in order to create and implement the new course in our university. All teaching materials (lectures, reader and case studies) were developed in TUD and Wolverhampton, our work was to adapt this material for Russian learners. Finally, after hard and assiduous work USURT has organized first pilot courses for representatives of transport and engineering enterprises like JSC “Russian Railways”, airport “Koltsovo”, forwarding companies “Masgroup” and “Maksitrans”. Fifteen participants have started to investigate the unknown field of intercultural marketing and cross-cultural communication.
European experts arrived just in the middle of the course and had an opportunity to evaluate them and ask feedback directly from course participants. Katharina Hutter said: “We feel that the trip was extremely useful in terms of looking at the pilot courses, and equally importantly, we enjoyed ourselves immensely, learnt a lot about Russia and deepened friendships. We have to assume, the participants are very interested in the topic intercultural marketing and management. For this, the work of the international office, and especially from Marina Zhuravskaya and Eugenia Kostousova has to be mentioned. They took care arranged the course in a very good way and took care about the project REMARK in a extremely ambitious way. Thank you all so much for your hospitality and all the work for REMARK!”.
Besides meeting with course participants, there was one more interesting event for experts. Also on the 23rd of April USURT English language teachers from two departments: "Foreign languages" and "Foreign languages and Intercultural Communications" invited Daphne Laing and Katharina Hutter to visit them. At this meeting they discussed training and pedagogical techniques and spoke about the further universities cooperation.
The courses have not finished yet, but we might say already that a good beginning makes a good ending.
