The president of Freie Universität Berlin, Professor Peter-André Alt, was visibly pleased at the approval. The reforms that have been made in recent years with the aid of the Teaching Quality Pact have improved students’ chances of successfully completing their programs at Freie Universität, Alt said. He continued that the new funding that has now been promised will be used to further improve the quality of teaching, thereby stabilizing the successful current concept until 2020.

The SUPPORT project at Freie Universität Berlin, which is financed using funding from the Teaching Quality Pact, has three parts: subproject 1, “Mentoring for Students”; subproject 2, “Learning Environments Online” (LEON); and subproject 3, “Skills for Teaching.” Plans call for these projects to be continued during the second phase of funding; in some cases, they will be further developed or realigned. For example, there are plans for mentoring activities during the initial phase of students’ programs to take the diversity of the subjects they are studying even more clearly into account, and for these activities to be supplemented by additional services throughout the study phase, from start to finish. In subproject 2, the individual measures aimed at development of electronic forms of teaching and studying will be pooled together in some areas and continued with different emphasis. In the area of skills for teaching, the target group and formats will be expanded.

The German federal government is providing the higher education institutions with about two billion euros to improve study conditions and teaching for the two funding phases between now and 2020. Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the joint medical school of Freie Universität and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, will also receive continued funding during the second phase.