Teaching at the KU
- discursive, interconnected, committed, tailored to individual needs.
The KU's main focus is to equip its students with excellent academic qualifications. Our lecturers are very concerned to give them the voice they need to be heard in academic discourse. But more than that: We not only want them to acquire expert knowledge, skills and get a good degree. We also want them to have what they need to develop personally and to give back to society. Important building blocks for this are personal supervision, an excellent network within the KU as well as extramurally and and a concept of education as a disourse process.
Students and lecturers at the KU appreciate the University’s excellent 1:10 staff-to-student ratio, which enables intensive personal support for students, research-based teaching practice and learning, and the development of values through the promotion of social responsibility. Our vision for higher education in the future combines the strengths of the analog world in face-to-face settings with the possibilities of digitalization for all KU members in the sense of a post-digital education.
The focus here is specifically on the question of how we, as human beings, want to live, learn, and work in a digitalized world. If digitality is understood not as an end in itself but as a natural element of learning, then a purely technical approach to the digitalization of education is not, in and of itself, innovation. Educational innovations at the KU use digitalization as a means to the end of a human-centered culture of digitally supported learning, which places lecturers and learners at the center of teaching practice.
Award-winning University!
The quality of studies and the teaching practice at the KU is regularly confirmed by surveys, rankings, and awards. Most recently, in 2026, KU was named the most popular university in Germany for the fourth time by Studycheck.de, the most widely read online portal for higher education and university studies. The ranking is based on more than 78,000 reviews submitted by students and alumni for their universities. 97 percent of KU students would recommend studying at their university.
In November 2024, Pope Francis honored a service-learning project at the KU. The Uniservitate network, a global association of Catholic universities, aims to promote service-learning (learning through engagement) and embed it within institutions. The award-winning project focused on language support for children whose native language is not German—for this, Kristina Löblein received the “Global Award” from the Uniservitate network.
In addition, the University itself awards the KU Prize for Good Teaching once a year to courses and teaching projects that serve as best practice examples. The award recognizes lecturers who have designed and implemented a teaching project that contributes in a special way to the KU’s specialization.
Quality of studies and teaching
To ensure that teaching and learning at the KU meet these standards, various quality management tools are in place. Course evaluations are conducted on a regular basis. In addition, a continuing education program in academic staff development in higher education is available to all faculty members. The faculties responsible for quality assurance in teaching practice and learning are supported in this effort by the division of quality management in teaching practice and learning.
