The visit was organized by Dr. Andreas Schwarz, Head of the research group on Public Relations and Communication of Technology (PRTK), and financed by the Erasmus Worldwide program. Within this framework, an exchange program between the two institutes with reciprocal visits of students and lecturers or researchers has already existed since 2013. The Erasmus funding was obtained by the PRTK group with the support of the International Office of the TU Ilmenau in 2017 and currently runs until summer 2023. In January, Ilmenau students of media and communication studies will visit UCF, while in April UCF students will come to Ilmenau. In the future, the program could be expanded to include a double degree program for the two master's programs, Media and Communication Science at IfMK and Communication at NSCM. Intensive talks were held on this during the visit.
In addition, the cooperation in the field of risk and crisis communication research was further deepened. NSCM is also involved in the current DECIPHER project, as two of the international Mercator Fellows are from UCF and support the DFG project: Deanna D. Sellnow and Timothy Sellnow. Both were themselves guests in Ilmenau last summer for a month-long research stay.
Prof. Littlefield gave guest lectures in numerous courses last week and supported an information event of the International Office on Wednesday about the possibilities of a semester abroad. He also held talks with the dean of the Faculty of Business and Media, Prof. Dr. Oliver Budzinski, and the president of TU Ilmenau, Prof. Dr. Kai-Uwe Sattler.
UCF in Orlando is the largest university in the USA. Similar to IfMK, NSCM follows an interdisciplinary approach and teaches in the fields of journalism and strategic communication, media production and management, digital media, video games and film.