Peer Learning has been approved as a most effective form of learning in many areas in the last two decades. (e.g. Topping 2005, Girgensohn 2007).

The concept stands for learning and teaching at eye level, i.e. the teaching of competences and knowledge by „peers“ (Peer learning can be defined as the acquisition of knowledge and skill through active helping and supporting among status equals or matched companions. It involves people from similar social groupings who are not professional teachers helping each other to learn and learning themselves by so doing.)

Advantages: non-hierarchical learning processes, peers identify better with existing (learning) needs and emotions (Bruffee 1980); learning and teaching peers acquire team competences.

Cross-curricular teaching involves on the one hand a conscious effort to apply knowledge to more than one academic discipline simultaneously (Jacobs, 1989), and on the other hand that students from two different university types are brought together and tutors initially work with the new group.

Possibilities: dealing with often critisized phenomena of tertiary education such as "fragmentation and isolated skill instruction"; achievement of learning objectives such as "transfer of learning, teaching students to think and reason, and providing a curriculum more relevant to students" (Marzano, 1991; Perkins, 1991).

Service learning is a didactic method which encourages students to combine the scientific contents of academic teaching with charitable commitment. The aim is a reciprocal effect of theoretical knowledge and practical work which in turn generates a benefit for students, teachers and the society surrounding them.

Advantages: Acqusition of practice-oriented knowledge and practical experience; personality development especially of problem solving and key competences; civic and social awareness. (Jaeger/in der Smitten/Grützmacher 2009)