Together with the Great Lakes College Association’s Global Liberal Arts Alliance, CoreCollaborative International created a workshop designed to train and facilitate faculty teams from around the world in delivering effective global learning courses for their students.
Comprised of member colleges located in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the Great Lakes College Association’s mission is to strengthen and preserve its member colleges, and promote education in the liberal arts and sciences. As one part of its work, the GLCA founded and administers the Global Liberal Arts Alliance (GLAA), a partnership of 30 colleges and universities from more than a dozen countries. The GLAA works to strengthen the ability of liberal arts institutions to operate in the global space, facilitating global curricular and co-curricular connections, as well as scholarly activities, among its member institutions. The GLAA’s goal is to foster a community of institutional leaders, faculty, staff, and students to address pressing issues of our globalized 21st century.
Among GLAA’s ongoing programs is one called Global Course Connections which, since its inception in 2015, has offered nearly 100 internationally connected courses across the GLAA network. Also known as virtual exchange or Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), courses of this type typically connect two classrooms from different countries together in common coursework, offering high-impact, low-cost ways to bring global perspectives into the classroom. In each case, instructor teams collaborate to develop content and assignments that their students work on together, encouraging global learning while meeting the individual learning objectives of each course. Virtual exchange brings benefits for both faculty and students, including in the areas of professional development, research, the fostering of critical self-reflection and global soft skills, and the application of multiple perspectives.
As noted elsewhere, as virtual exchange initiatives increase, so too does the recognition of a need to scaffold the pedagogy and structure involved in these learning experiences – including a need to prepare faculty, and assess the learning outcomes of students who take part. Does virtual exchange encourage growth in cultural intelligence among its learners? To get at an answer to this question, there’s a need for meaningful assessment which intentionally aligns cultural intelligence definitions, cultural learning activities and assignments, and academic course objectives. All this requires supporting faculty and preparing them to facilitate cultural learning alongside academic content.
The GLAA recognized that it needed to provide faculty in its Global Course Connections (GCC) program with this kind of training, and it approached CoreCollaborative International (CCI) for help. Together, they created a workshop for each of the two-person faculty teams selected across the 30 universities in the GCC network. The aim of the workshop was to enhance the capacity of faculty as they plan and co-teach these courses offered online between diverse international contexts.
In answering this call and putting together the workshop, the CCI team utilized best practices in the field of internationalization and global learning. Baseline assessment information was collected from the participating faculty teams, which allowed CCI to generate GCC-specific learning outcomes, as well as materials that could be adapted for use in GCC syllabi for future learning and cultural intelligence outcomes assessment. CCI planned the workshop with a constructivist approach, designed to scaffold and enhance the capacity of GCC faculty to effectively plan and support collaborative online learning within a global context.
The workshop planned by GLAA and CCI was three and a half days in length. Pre-workshop activities were designed to help faculty prepare for the seminar, including online synchronous sessions to create an effective community of learners and to familiarize participants with three key concepts underlying the workshop content: Understanding by Design, Transformative Learning, and Intercultural Competence. The workshop was designed to be interactive, with the CCI team using simulations and modeling activities that develop cultural intelligence through virtual exchange, and that provide methods for reframing academic content course objectives to align with cultural intelligence outcomes.
Together in their faculty teams, faculty would develop course outcomes, content, and assessment across their joint courses. At the workshop’s conclusion, the CCI team would administer a post-workshop survey, and deliver a summary report to stakeholders in the GLAA. A concrete outcome of the workshop was the development of rubrics that can be used to assess global learning and the development of cultural intelligence as a result of the GCC learning experience. On a more individual level, the workshop was also meant to expand participants’ thinking about collaboration and pedagogy and deepen their understanding of the liberal arts in an international context.
Unfortunately, this workshop planning had been taking place in late 2019 and early 2020 – just as the start of COVID – and the workshop had been scheduled to take place, in person, in the summer of 2020, to prepare those faculty who had been accepted to teach during the 2020-2021 academic year. Though most of the planning was completed, the workshop was predicated on in-person involvement which, it became clear, was no longer feasible in the midst of the growing pandemic.
With that, the original intent of the project shifted, in a fortuitous way. While planning for the GLAA workshop, the CCI team had also been working separately to put together a virtual train-the-trainer program in virtual exchange. Responding to the worldwide need to equip administrators and faculty to facilitate virtual exchange experiences, especially in the face of grounded study abroad programs, CCI’s Virtual Exchange Professional Development launched in August 2020. Since the GLAA workshop was unable to run, the GLAA decided to pursue the workshop training in this different, virtual guise.
GLCA’s Senior Program Director Simon J.M. Gray, who oversees programming for the GLAA, enrolled as one member in the inaugural cohort of VEPD. He brought along with him colleagues from other institutions within the GLAA network, including the American University of Nigeria and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador). In the following year, the VEDP-trained GLAA network continued to expand to additional partners. The training through VEPD equipped GLAA to go on to train faculty throughout its network in many of the same principles which had inspired the GLAA workshop. CCI has subsequently offered the VEPD course several more times. Each time it does, its impact is exponential, since each VEPD participant goes on to train others within their networks – as Dr. Gray and his colleagues did in that first iteration of the course.
Though the Great Lakes College Association-Global Liberal Arts Alliance workshop was not delivered in its original guise, it is an example of CoreCollaborative International’s personalized approach to learning experience design. CCI knows that learning is personal. The CCI team works with each of its institutional partners to design learning experiences that take into account who learners are, in order to deliver intentional curriculum planning that maximizes learning. In this case, CCI was able to customize programming not only to its client’s needs but also to the reality of a pandemic, ensuring that the client received needed training within a new, virtual context.
Whether your organization is looking for ways to facilitate globally connected learning experiences or other types of learning, CCI can help. Contact the CCI team to find out what’s possible.