Feature your future: A digital and international summer school

A teaching concept for first international experiences This guide offers higher education lecturers practical support in organizing and conducting virtual exchange summer schools to enable intercultural experiences from home. It is aimed at lecturers who want to design digital exchange courses for doctoral candidates and advanced master's students in all subject degrees. It presents a proven concept for designing short digital exchanges and shows how intercultural experiences can be facilitated and designed in the digital space for a heterogeneous group of participants from different study programs, , and institutions. As an Open Educational Resource (OER), it provides design tips, sample tasks, and practical advice for implementation in English that can be easily transferred to other contexts. The design and implementation were funded by the Foundation for Innovation in Higher Education as part of the Digital Transformation Lab for Teaching and Learning Project at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Two pilot projects The virtual exchange teaching concept was piloted and evaluated at the Leuphana Graduate School from July 12-14, 2023, with the Institute for the Future at KU Leuven and the Researcher Development Centre at the University of Glasgow, and from April 2-4, 2025, with the Institute for the Future at KU Leuven. In 2023, the event was held under the title “Feature Your Future: International Career Perspectives for Master's Students and Doctoral Candidates.” The learning objectives of this event were future-oriented skills and reflection on personal career perspectives. The content focused on the future of higher education. In 2025, the event was held under the title “Feature Your Future: Envisioning Research Culture in 2050” in cooperation with subproject 6 “Skills for a Digital Future,” and the focus was on acquiring reflection skills and future-oriented thinking in an international space for experience. The focus was on the future of research culture. Evaluation results The qualitative evaluation by lecturers, workshop facilitators, student assistants, and participants shows a high level of satisfaction with the course concept and confirms that the intercultural learning experience is perceived as enriching and that the digital learning environment and didactic design are perceived as conducive to exchange. Although no direct quantitative increase in intercultural competence was measured, the concept can be recommended as a preparatory element for physical exchanges and as a valuable building block in a series of international learning experiences.