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Objective: The following article presents OFIF, a project that has been running at the medical faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich (LMU) since 2013. International students of medicine often lag behind their fellow domestic students in terms of language ability and communication skills. To compensate, OFIF offers communication skills courses with an emphasis on exam preparation. Below, we will discuss the project's success, challenges and future opportunities. Methods: In their daily academic routine, communication presents one of the greatest challenges for international students of medicine. With the aid of case scenarios and activities from clinical practice, the project courses teach strategies for effective communication. The methodical concept of the OFIF training is based on the six levels of learning of the revised edition of Bloom's taxonomy. Results: Since 2013, more than 40 trainings and classes for international medical students have been offered. In the winter term of 2017/18, 49 students representing all clinical semesters participated in the OFIF activities. An evaluation of the training classes consistently yielded positive results (95 % of the items were given a score between 9 and 10, on a scale from 1 to 10.) Conclusions: Both the amount of interest (as expressed by the number of actively participating students) and the high percentage of positive evaluations consistently demonstrate that the didactical concept underlying OFIF is useful and could serve as a best practice example for similar projects at other institutions. On the other hand, the 49 participants from all clinical semesters represented but 10 % of the total population of international students in the winter term of 2017/18. Further research examining the concrete effects of OFIF on the academic success of international students at the LMU is therefore desirable.

Background: It has been documented that international students face diverse challenges due to language and cultural barriers. International medical students suffer from personal distress, a lack of support and perform poorer than local fellow-students in clinical examinations. It has been documented that international medical students benefit from peer-led tutorials in their first year. We investigated the effectiveness of a tutorial offered for international medical students in their second year. Methods: A peer-guided examination preparation course with interactive elements for second year international medical students was designed, learning objectives were defined. Two evaluations were undertaken: In a quantitative assessment, students were asked to fill out five multiple-choice-questions at the beginning of every session of the tutorial (pre-test) as well as to participate in a post-test at the end of the semester in which all former multiple-choice-questions were re-used. Using a qualitative approach, participants were asked for their thoughts and comments in a semi-structured interview at the end of the semester. Results: International students (N=12) showed significantly better results in the post- than in the pre-test (t(11)=-8.48, p<.001, d=1.95). Within the interviews, international students (N=10) reported to have benefited from technical and didactic, as well as social learning experiences. The individual lectures students were asked to contribute were discussed controversially. Conclusion: Our peer-guided tutorial for second year international medical students is an effective and well accepted possibility to prepare these students for examinations.

Although well respected, German universities are no longer considered world class. Efforts to rejuvenate the German university system include a competition to confer elite status on the country's ten leading universities.

Changes in the German medical licensing law in 2002 demanded the inclusion of sound scientific knowledge and practical skills in the medical education programme for undergraduates. The universities were given ample autonomy to implement this goal, so that subjects not yet included in the curricula, such as Evidence-based Medicine (EbM), could now be integrated in the study course. Hence, in 2003 the Medical Faculty of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt/Germany implemented (as first institution) a mandatory clinical training in EbM for third-year medical students. The content and structure of the seminar are based on the "Curriculum EbM" of the German Network of Evidence-Based Medicine. This project is conducted exclusively by intern medical students with previous training in teaching skills and specific knowledge. The seminar is integrated in the interdisciplinary field "Epidemiology, biostatistics, and informatics". The four-day seminars consist of lectures and small-group teaching based on Internet search of medical information as well as on the critical appraisal of studies that deal with therapeutic and diagnostic problems; the self-evaluation of the information-retrieval process is also included. Special importance is attached to the need of scrutinising published medical information. The grades are based on seminar-oriented tests as well as on end-of-term examinations. The Frankfurt project shows that EbM can be easily implemented in medical undergraduate courses.