EPICUR in Practice: Or How Internationalization Actually Happens

In reality, it often starts with something far less sophisticated. In my case, it started with sending an email to colleagues at The University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU) and asking, more or less, ‘Shall we try something?’

They said yes. Which is already a small success in academia.

What followed was a joint seminar between SDU and BOKU in environmental, resource and agricultural economics. The idea sounded deceptively simple. Bring students together across countries, let them write seminar papers and create some form of international learning experience without immediately creating administrative chaos.

We started in a hybrid format, which means that for the first weeks we conducted a series of experiments on how many people can be present in an online session without actually being present. Cameras off, microphones muted, occasional appearances from kitchens, trains and what looked suspiciously like a supermarket aisle.

It turns out that hybrid teaching works remarkably well once everyone agrees to actually participate. Cameras on is not just a technical preference. It is the thin line between a seminar and a collection of silent observers.

Once we crossed that line, things improved. Students began to engage with each other’s work, mostly through structured peer review. And here something interesting happened. Students are perfectly capable of giving sharp feedback, especially when it is someone else’s paper. Entire paragraphs were politely dismantled. Arguments were questioned with impressive precision. Academic politeness remained intact, but only just.

We also experimented with making the writing process visible. Not just the final product, but the messy part in between. How do you find literature without falling into a three-hour rabbit hole? How do you structure a paper when everything initially feels important? And how do you use AI in a way that does not result in a text that sounds suspiciously fluent but says very little?

And then came Vienna.

The final seminar presentations took place there in January 2026. This was the moment when the entire hybrid experiment encountered reality. Students who had previously been two-dimensional suddenly appeared in full scale. Some were taller than expected. All of them were more talkative.

The difference was immediate. Discussions became faster, more direct and slightly less polite in a productive sense. It is much harder to ignore a critical question when it is asked from across the table rather than from a muted microphone.

The conference itself did what conferences are supposed to do but rarely achieve. It created actual exchange. Students compared arguments, challenged each other and, importantly, continued discussions outside the formal setting. Academic debate merged seamlessly with conversations about study systems, future plans and the relative strengths of Austrian and Danish coffee.

From a teaching perspective, the conclusions are almost disappointingly simple. Hybrid formats are useful. Peer review works. Physical meetings matter. None of this is particularly revolutionary, yet putting it together in a coherent way turns out to be surprisingly effective.

The more interesting lesson is perhaps this: internationalisation does not primarily happen through strategic documents. It happens when you connect people, give them a concrete task and accept a certain level of imperfection along the way.

Or, to put it less diplomatically, it happens when you stop planning at some point and just start.

In our case, this led from a single email to a room full of students presenting their work in Vienna, confidently critiquing each other’s arguments and occasionally enjoying the process.

For an initiative that started without a diagram, that seems like a reasonable outcome.