developing collaborative online international courses pre-conference workshop presenters: jon rubin,...
TRANSCRIPT
Developing Collaborative Online International Courses
Pre-Conference Workshop
Presenters:Jon Rubin, Anthony (Tony) Lemieux, and Melanie Wilson
Center of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL)State University Of New York (SUNY)
Today’s Agenda
Introductions COIL: Brief History Live from NY: Faculty experience of COIL:
course overview (Virtual Presentation) Important concepts and use of Guide (handout) 5-10 minute Break Hands on Activity – role play Next Steps
Overview of Global Networking for COIL Pillars of support
Partnerships, Policies and Pedagogies
Cross Cultural CollaborationEstablishing and retaining equity between
partnersConsiderations for online collaboration
Faculty Guide for Collaborative Online International Learning
5 minute Break
Role Playing Activity – Part 1 Select a partner a role (provided)
From the perspective of your 'character' and referring to the information in the guide and the questions within the tables, work with your partner to identify an issue that may arise (such as time, language, technology, course content, assessment etc.)
For each issue, negotiate an agreement.
Write your final decision for each issue with how you will proceed on a Post It notes.
Role Playing Activity – Part 2Presentation (5 minutes each team) Using your Post Its, place your issues
and decisions on the wall, and jointly present the decisions made for each issue.
Team 1: Role Description Role A:
US Faculty member at a mid-size university in rural Wisconsin. Your university has many international partnerships through university consortia, but you like to work below the radar. You chose this partner because you feel that his students' experience and interpretation of the course content will be very different from that of your students. This is not the first time you have done this kind of collaboration, but it is the first time with this partner and with this specific course. Your institution uses Blackboard, but you hate using it, even though your fairly competent in the LMS. You prefer to use free tools on the Internet to keep the administration outside of your collaboration.
Role BYou are an international faculty member that heard about the possible collaboration at a conference. You don't know this professor well, but have read their publications and think highly of their contribution to the scholarship in your field. You are currently at a state-run university with limited resources located in Eastern Europe, and you think this collaboration could be very important for your country and US relations, but you worry that your dean will not understand its value. You have already decided that you will document your experience in hopes that further discussions with your superiors will help students get more access to online resources for class. Your students meet with you face-to-face and your institution uses Moodle mainly as a repository for the course syllabus, required texts and.a place to submit papers, but you wish it were used more robustly.
Team 2: Role description Role A
You are an assistant professor of engineering at a large world-renowned university in the North Eastern US. You have just received a grant to help develop cultural situatedness in your Civil Engineering Design course. Because of the density of the material to be covered, you have decided that you only want to add a module or two to the course to specifically address the cultural situatedness of the analysis of design documents, but given that this is a key component of success for any design job in another culture you want give it precedence. You have heard about collaborative online international learning, and would like to collaborate with an international partner whose culture has very different design document criteria. Your school uses Blackboard and you are at ease with technology. You will also be up for tenure next year and would like to generate a paper from this exercise, but are also concerned that a bad outcome from this initiative could negatively affect your tenure.
Role B You are a full professor of civil engineering and departmental chair at a large university in
India. You would like to respond to student's requests to have more instruction on how to work in a US setting as many of your graduates get jobs with companies based in the US. You have heard about collaborative online learning from a colleague and recently met a professor (your partner) at a conference in Oslo that had an interesting project and was looking for partners. You have decided that as an experienced professor you should try a collaboration first before asking faculty in your department to engage in this modality. You teach graduate students and think this may be just what they are looking for. Your university uses a homegrown learning management system and has internet access on campus. You are familiar with the LMS, but let the IT manage the technology. Students mostly are connected to the Internet at home but it is very expensive. They come in once a week so you feel that this time can be used for collaboration.
Team 3: Role Description Role A
You are a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at a small women-only Ivy League US university and just got your first course to teach on 'Images of women' next semester. It is an undergraduate course and you are excited about how to make this a memorable experience for students. You have a friend who graduated a year before you, who currently teaches in the Caribbean, with whom you often discussed the potential to collaborate online if one or the other traveled to another country. You have just sent an email to your friend and hope that you will be able to collaborate, although you have never taught an online course before.
Role BYou have just received an email from a friend at the university from which you recently graduated. She is teaching a course on 'Images of Women' and would like to collaborate next semester. You teach an introduction to the humanities course at a community college in the Caribbean as well as supervise students in the teacher preparation program. Resources are hard to come by and students come from a diverse background. All are very motivated but often have jobs to support their education. You think this could be a great opportunity but are not sure how you could manage it, especially as you only used an LMS as a student in college and your friend's course is so different from yours. You are still new to the school but think that a collaboration would be positively received. You decide to speak to your friend and discuss specifics.
Team 4: Role Description Role A:
You are a TOEFL instructor with students mostly from Latin America, and you would like to prepare your students for work outside of the US. You have a colleague currently teaching at a university in South Korea, and you have asked to collaborate with her students who are also learning English. She has agreed, but neither of you has taught language online, although you have taught an English comp course online, so you both must work out a methodology and a common area of discourse for the students.
Role BYou are a ESL teacher in S. Korea and a previous colleague currently working in the US has contacted you about a potential collaboration. Your students use technology frequently, accessing podcasts and watching movies and TV shows available on the Internet. You are pleased abut this collaboration because you have wanted to develop an immersion module and this collaboration has the potential of linking your colleague’s students with yours. You will need to OK this with your Dean who is rather conservative, but wants to develop a student exchange program with an American university.
Team 5: Role Description Role A:
You are teaching a graduate seminar at a mid-size university in Florida (EST) preparing students for academic journal collaborative writing. You have a colleague who teaches a similar course in British Columbia, Canada (PST) and you have both decided that you will partner your students to collaborate and write an opinion piece. You think that having students additionally reflect on their experiences by keeping a journal of the collaboration would be a deep learning experience. You are both quite comfortable with technology, and would like to use free internet tools for the collaboration.
Role B:You are teaching a graduate seminar in British Columbia, Canada and you have a colleague at a university in Florida who would like to collaborate by partnering your students to collaborate and write an opinion piece. You have very rigid assessment requirements at your school, and you need to make sure that this collaboration can be graded. You are both quite comfortable with technology, and though your partner would like to use free internet tools for the collaboration, your school uses Blackboard and has Elluminate (for web conferencing) and a robust instructional design team that could potentially help set up this collaboration.
Team 6: Role Description Role A:
You are an instructional designer at a Midwestern university that uses Blackboard, and has a well developed distance learning program. You have just attended a SLOAN-C session on collaborative online learning and are excited about encouraging faculty on your campus to engage in this kind of teaching and learning. You know other instructional designers in Europe and Latin America and have decided to speak to your director to develop an information session for faculty, but decide to contact your international colleagues by email first to get their response. What would you tell them and what questions might you pose?
Role B:
You are an instructional designer at a moderate-sized technical college in Germany and have recently gotten excited about about the Erasmus student mobility programs which your school, unfortunately has not participated in extensively. Your campus uses Moodle, but primarily to support face-to-face and hybrid courses. You receive an email from a colleague in the States who is very excited about developing online collaborations and who wants your input about this idea and asks if you can speak to your dean and to some faculty to see if they would be interested. You have some questions to ask your American colleague first, before you engage your German colleagues. What would these be?
Team 7: Role Description Role A:
You are an adjunct professor at a private online US university teaching digital animation. Your students work in a proprietary LMS that has file sharing, web conferencing, and the typical asynchronous discussion boards. You have small cohorts of no more than 12 students, and you need to develop a module on cultural adaptation of cartoons. A colleague (also at your online university but at the Mexico-satellite campus) teaches Spanish translation and you think that this could be an interesting collaboration of students (where her students work with your students to develop culturally relevant Spanish-translated animations). You know you will need to contact an instructional designer for some ideas on how this could be done.
Role B You are an instructional designer at a large private online university with satellite
campuses in 5 countries, and students from all over the world. You have just been contacted by an instructor who wants to collaborate with another colleague in another discipline to have students work in teams. You have almost unlimited financial resources when it comes to course development, however, these two cohorts of students are very different in that they pay different fees and the satellite campus has significantly less resources available. You have an online meeting organized with both faculty, and recently received a ‘Faculty guide for online international course development’, and have decided to use it to help guide the conversation during this meeting. You know the idea sounds good, but there may be additional hurdles that the instructors likely have not thought about.
Role Playing Activity: Questions Did one partner's needs outweigh the
other? and did your negotiated agreement favour one partner more than the other?
Why do you think this did (or did not) occur?
Upon reflection, how would you approach the decision making process differently, if at all?
Activity Wrap up What trends do we see in the issues that
arose? How does the concept of inequitable
positions of power within partnerships impact your thinking of the negotiation process?
What did you take away from exercise? Are there any questions/ specific issues
related to your ‘real life’ engagement in COIL?
SUNY COIL Center 2011 Conference Collaboration and Technology in
International Online Learning Environments : Constructing a New Paradigm
When? March 31-April 1, 2011 Where? SUNY Global Center, 116 E. 55th
St. New York, NY Register?: Visit www.suny.edu/global/coil
NEH Institute for Globally Networked Learning in The Humanities. This 3 year project aimed at supporting and
expanding globally networked learning Consists of discipline specific workshops,
online community of practice, and capstone conference in 2013.
Applications are encouraged from university teams that include:Faculty members whose disciplinary foci are in the
areas of: Human Societies; Language and Literature; International Relations; Media, Arts & Cultures; or Freshman Foundations.
An Instructional Designer An International Programs staff member
NEH Institute for Globally Networked Learning in The Humanities. Applications available: Dec.1st, 2010. Deadline to Apply: April 30th, 2011. More Information about the Institute:
Call for Participation (handout)Visit www.suny.edu/global/coilEmail Jon or Melanie with your specific
questions.
Need a further consultation? Let us know! We’ll be happy to meet
with you during the conference to discuss your specific situation.
Email: [email protected]
Academic Literature on Globally Networked Learning Environments 2010 Special Issue on GNLEs in E-Learning and
Digital Media: http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/content/pdfs/7/issue7_2.asp
Fitzgerald and Lemieux’s 2009 article reflecting on their course available at:
http://www.eliss.org.uk/CurrentIssueVol23/ViewArticlev2i3/tabid/286/itemid/117/pubtabid/293/repmodid/411/Default.aspx
Starke-Meyerring and Wilson’s 2008 book Designing Globally Networked Learning Environments: Visionary Partnerships, Policies and Pedagogies
https://www.sensepublishers.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=21&products_id=596&osCsid=1a7
Thank you and enjoy the Conference!
- Jon, Melanie and Tony