Below you will find some information that will be useful in the planning phase of your course - before you send in the actual proposal. 

All Summer University courses must be linked to a study programme and must be approved by the relevant board of studies. So before you start developing a course, it might be a good idea to contact your head of studies, before you make the final course proposal.

Target Audience
Please consider if you could open up for attracting more international students to your course. By offering your course as a 10 ects undergraduate course more international students will have access to it, than if 5 or Master level.
Likewise if you wish to attract students from other Danish universities it is also a good idea to offer a 10 ects course rather than a 5 ects. 

The title of your course
Over the past years we’ve observed that the students often look at the courses with interesting titles that contain some good buzzwords. Course content needs to live up to its title of course, so there need to be a coherence, but we’re seeing an increase in interest for courses with great titles. They sell themselves. This is a factor that should be considered and one that we’ll be happy to advise on. So perhaps consider a more creative course title than the one you would pick for a semester course for Aarhus students only. 

What happens now?

First and foremost the course description needs to be accepted by the board of studies in order for it to enter the course catalogue. In connection to this you’ll be asked to fill in a template for the course description, in case you didn’t already do so when the course was registered.

In addition your course will have its own page at www.au.dk/summeruniversity with text, illustration and contact information. For this page we’ll need a short, sales text and maybe an illustration. This page is primarily directed at the international students.

Once the course is in the course catalogue and the page is on the website, the course needs to be marketed in order to attract a many students for your course as possible.

Below you can read about all the things we do, but also what you can do yourself.

Marketing your course

What we do:

Marketing is partly directed towards AU students and other Danish students, partly towards international students from AU’s partner universities and free-moving international students. We produce posters, postcards, conference folders as well as various merchandise for use in recruitment on an international level. In addition we also make ads for facebook, produce newsletters, make campaigns for study portals and upload courses to online databases, which attract students both internationally and from other Danish universities. We have regular contact with previous students and lecturers as well as the international coordinators at our partner universities. We also participate in and promote AU Summer University at EAIE, APAIE, NAFSA as well as Tilvalgsdagen, International Day and Kandidatdagen locally at AU. Additionally we also receive regular visits from partner universities where the courses are promoted. We primarily market AU Summer University as a brand and usually not the individual courses.

What can you do:

It might be relevant to supplement our broad marketing strategy, with a more dedicated campaign targeted at certain audiences, which might be a specific university or within a narrow area of study if your course is directed at a specific audience. In that case it’ll require a determined effort from the lecturers or the international coordinator on a professional level to ensure that there’ll be an adequate number of applicants for the summer school. As a lecturer you could therefore use your international network and you could inform current students or send materials we produce to relevant colleagues abroad.

 Conducting your course

When it has been confirmed that your course is being held, we’ll make sure that you can focus on the subject matter in regards to planning and executing your course and having a positive experience over the summer without having to think of the practical things. In the beginning of April you’ll receive more information about when you can access the course and the students on Blackboard and which room you’ll have assigned.

Below you can see a timeline of what happens after your course has been confirmed and right up till the evaluations of the re-exams.