Forum on Education Abroad

I'm currently, I mean like right now participating 'virtually' in a workshop at the Forum on Education Abroad in Charlotte, NC. Jon Rubin, Director of the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning Center (COIL) at Purchase College kindly asked me to participate together with him for the third time. As I write Jon is showing a video two of the students (one US, one Belarus) in his cross-cultural video course made together. These two students did not share a common language as the Belarussian student had no knowledge of English. All of the communication took place using video and music. Absolutely fascinating - communicating about oneself and one's culture using non-linguistic texts. It's like a discussion forum with no words. This needs to be part of the future of education. "It's really hard to talk about art. It's even harder to talk about your own art. But since you're collaborating, it's even harder to talk about how someone else, who you don't know, influenced your art."

Before Jon, Wayne, Professor of History at Purchase College at SUNY, presented a course he 'transferred' online to collaborate with a university in Turkey. He highlighted that two students who had just come home from study abroad made important contributions, as did two study abroad students in Turkey, and two more students applied to study abroad after taking his course. He ended with a comment on the fact that he believes there need to be more of these international collaborations, but that maybe they should be short, modular courses not worth more than 3 credits, in order to promote more of them. Couldn't agree more - it's kind of the conclusion we've come to in Padova with the whole stage option.

Before Wayne, Craig Little, who I'd already presented with, showed his international course on Social Control. Again, very interesting and what's particularly amazing is the amount of discussion that goes on.

Before that, me. More about that later. Right now they are having a coffee break so I think I might go have one too! It's an honor to work with these people.

Developing International Online Course Collaborations that Build Bridges to Study Abroad

• Jon Rubin, Director, The SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning at Purchase College
• Sarah Guth, English as a Second Language teacher, University of Padua, Italy
• Wayne te Brake, Professor of History, Purchase College at SUNY
• Craig Little, Distinguished Service Professor,Sociology/Anthropology, SUNY Cortland

The online modality is increasingly part of our students’ lives and can become an important addition to international education, if approached thoughtfully. With many of those in international education raising issues regarding the present state of cultural immersion for those studying abroad in the age of Facebook, this workshop will attempt to develop a culturally sensitive response to current online life and will thereby help develop a new vision for education abroad in the 21st Century. Four faculty experienced in globally-networked learning will describe how their students work online with peers in other countries through shared syllabi in an experiential learning environment, and how this engagement has internationalized their classes and led to an increased interest in studying abroad. Each presenter will offer a case study of the course that they developed and taught, followed by an overview of the ways that courses can be linked to and encourage study abroad, the ways that the universities involved have (or have not) chosen to build upon this opportunity, how these courses also function to support faculty development in the area of internationalization, and ways that existing international partnerships can serve as the basis for the development of such courses and the plusses and minuses to this approach. Participants will explore the potential for developing international collaborative courses at their institutions. Prior to the workshop, registrants will be asked to identify potential collaborative courses and partner universities and we will develop these possibilities within the workshop interactively. A social networking web site will be built during the workshop through which workshop participants can stay in touch and continue to develop their courses after the conference.(Registration is closed for this workshop)