By taking part in international project consortia Tyumen State University can significantly expand its network of international academic relations. That, in turn, incites its lecturers and students to learn foreign languages, creates new opportunities for professional development of staff during foreign internships and as a result of participation in numerous international seminars and conferences, held under on-going projects, as well as in the framework of existing international agreements. Successful implementation of three Tempus projects, centered around ecology, resulted in a number of positive outcomes:
- more than 50 lecturers from the faculties of ecology and geography, biology, chemistry, the Institute of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technology, the Institute of Earth Sciences, the Institute of Biology, and the Institute of Chemistry attended courses in foreign languages for academic use;
- having taken part in numerous two-week foreign internships, more than 80 lecturers became acquainted with the environmental situation in various European countries, their common environmental problems and the ways they are addressed; got familiar with their systems of the environmental education, reflecting the “life-long learning” approach; the progress and tools of the Bologna process; the achievements made by research laboratories and educational institutions of some leading European universities, including the University of Alberta-Ludwig in Freiburg, one of the elite universities in Germany;
- students of natural sciences took part in a semester-long course, organized by the universities of Wolverhampton, Freiburg and Landau;
- since 2000, regular seminars on most topical issues given by lecturers from partner universities have been held for lecturers and students of the Tyumen State University;
- by taking part in international summer schools dedicated to environment, conducted since 2001 at the summer training camp of the Tyumen State University, located on the Black Sea coast and Lake Kuchak (Tyumen Region), Tyumen State University students have the opportunity to discuss the problems of environmental protection and sustainable development of the territories with Professor E. Wagner (University of Freiburg), as well as leading lecturers and students of European partner universities and Tyumen State University;
- thanks to the support of international environmental projects, programmes for professional environmental education have been modernized, a master's programme, titled "Geoecological foundations for sustainable water use", has been developed, and training classes and laboratories have been equipped with modern teaching aids
Following the initiative of the Regional Institute for International Cooperation, the MBA, implemented jointly with the University of Wolverhampton (Great Britain) and the Norwegian-Russian Master's Programme, titled "Innovation Management" implemented in partnership with the University College in Bodo, were launched at the Institute for Continuing Education of Tyumen State University. The programmes were supported by the “Bridge” Project of the British Council.
Since 2010, an International school in ecology, supervised by Professor Edgar Wagner of Freiburg University, has been running on the basis of RIIC of Tyumen State University (working languages are English and German), whose participants acquire practical experience of professional academic communication and receive recommendations for enrolling in European universities, which significantly increases their professional competitiveness.
