Annual reports are available online and as PDF files
Go to our 
10 Traps to Avoid in Global Learning Projects
Posted 8:00:59 AM - Friday, April9, 2004
Some global learning projects work well and result in a really worthwhile learning experience for students, while others just don’t make it. What are some of the common traps and how can you avoid them?
1. Lack of integration into learning activities.
2. Absence of reciprocity of benefits and involvement.
3. Not part of assessed outcomes.
4. Inadequate communication technology.
5. Weak relationship with overseas collaborators.
6. Absence of institutional support.
7. Lack of preparation.
8. Problems with teamwork.
9. Absence of a Model Global Learner.
10. Insufficient time for socialization.
1. Lack of integration into learning activities.
If the global learning experience is separate to the main content and activities of the course, it is unlikely to be taken seriously by the students. The best approach is to redesign the course so that for at least a part of it, the means to achieving a particular learning outcome is through the global learning activity. For example, students drawn from different countries can be asked to collaborate on the task of conducting a literature review and then reporting that both in writing and in a presentation videoconference. To work in a team well, they have to be able to communicate well and to be able to do that; they must understand each other’s perspective, which means that some global learning has occurred.
2. Absence of reciprocity of benefits and involvement.
If faculty and students at each end do not see value in the integration of global learning into the course in question, then there will be little incentive to participate. The students at each end will develop the perspectives of their counterparts through interaction as they participate in some project-based learning assignment. The development of these perspectives, and even more importantly learning how to develop those perspectives, will add significant value to any course. This of itself should be sufficient reason to incorporate global learning. A one-sided approach in which one culture is considered superior or more important is unlikely to meet with success.
Even where the aim is to conduct distance education, delivering courses from a foreign perspective with no regard for the culture of the students will be make those courses less attractive than those form an institution that has paid attention to cultural differences.
3. No change in assessment.
A course that has been transformed from a traditional format to a more constructivist and project-based learning design will be producing different learning outcomes. To know whether the students have achieved these learning outcomes, the assessment method needs to change. If the students are working in teams, then to both provide an incentive to work in a team and to measure team performance, there needs to be an assessment of team output. At the same time, peer assessment may be used to determine the individual contributions of team members toward the team goal. It is also important, when learning critical thinking.
4. Inadequate communication technology.
Sometimes, global learning experiences can remain elusive if the communication technology lets us down. This can happen at the best of times with the latest technology. However, the reality is that much of the world, especially those parts from whose people we can learn a great deal, don’t have the technology, which we take for granted. If they don’t have access to the Internet, then we can resort to simple telephone conference calls. If they don’t have a telephone, we are out of luck in terms of timely interactions. The best situation is one in which participants in each country have access to a combination of asynchronous and synchronous communication technologies such as web-based course management systems and Internet-based video conferencing. These need to be put in place to enable the required global reach.
5. Weak relationship with overseas collaborators.
A frequent question from audiences, who are hearing about global learning for the first time, is “How do we get started?” The response is invariably that global learning links are best built on existing relationships, usually associated with research collaboration or participation in professional associations or conferences. Sometimes, the relationships arise from the faculty being migrants from a particular country, where they maintain links to colleagues in their field. Medium to longer term relationships prove better, because of the amount and complexity of communication about the aims and implementation of a global learning class. Sometimes, potential collaborators can proceed with implementation after having known each other for a short time, but this is a rarity. Generally, strong existing relationships are needed to assure the success of a project, especially when you consider that the faculty members need to be role models in terms of cage painting (see http://gl.wichita.edu/biblio/).
6. Absence of institutional support
The need for extra effort on the part of the instructor, who is responsible for the course, and the need to work in teams across the institution and the need for collaboration between institutions all depends on high-level institutional support. Quite apart from the investment in enabling infrastructure, additional resources associated with the course transformation process will have to be provided. Funds need to be provided for these, plus teaching relief for the faculty and for extra teaching assistance. Aside from eventually generating growth in credit hours, faculty and staff contributions to this process need to be rewarded both in terms of tenure and promotion and inkind. Prizes and awards for outstanding achievements are additional incentives. Overall, the process is helped if there is a clear message from the institution’s leaders that the incorporation of global learning into the curriculum is an institutional priority at a rhetorical level.
7. Lack of preparation.
Implementation of a global learning experience for students in a course or program has long term benefits and cannot usually occur overnight. There is often a need for extensive communication between collaborators at different institutions and between development team members at each institution. These teams will comprise people from different areas such as education, media, computing or networking. After the planning phase, a small global learning experience, perhaps associated with one learning activity and with just one other country is implemented with a view to refining it and adding more global learning activities as the collaborators get a sense of how best to integrate global learning experiences.
There is no denying that there is extra effort involved in getting started with the integration of global learning into the curriculum. It is only the first students have gone through and the word spreads that a course has this extra value, that enrolment will go up and ultimately there will be some credit hour growth. Two to three years have to be allowed for this effect to occur. In terms of investment of extra effort, the result should be that there will be less work for each faculty member, because they are sharing the task of running the course with others.
8. Problems with teamwork.
Team work and collaboration is critical to the success of a global learning initiative. There needs to be teamwork within each participating institution as the faculty, educational advisors, media, computing and networking people work together. Students are also important team members. They can advise on whether the approach is working from their perspective. Typically, these projects see faculty collaborating between departments and colleges as well as with key staff. Then there is collaboration between institutions. Global learning actually goes on in the planning phase, long before the course starts as people from different cultures learn more about each other. Often it helps to have a formal approach to determining our preferred role, when working in a team so we can achieve complimentarity between our respective team roles. This is preferable to leaving things to chance and ending up with problems due to personality clashes.
9. Absence of a Model Global Learner.
The process of global learning is to a degree a cognitive apprenticeship. In this apprenticeship the instructor needs to model the process by interacting with their counterparts in such a way that the key steps to painting cages and developing multiple perspectives are made explicit. This needs to be authentic rather than contrived. It is always helpful if the models, who apparently have known each other for a long time, are seen to have misunderstandings and then recognize this and clear them up. This is especially important in a metacognitive sense. We want the students, the apprentice global learners, to achieve the ability to deal effectively with people from entirely new and different cultures as learning outcomes. It is not sufficient to be able to deal with people from the cultures encountered in the actual class. They must distill from this experience the strategies to deal with people from other cultures.
10. Insufficient time allocated for socialization.
A critical component of communication via computers, according to Salmon (xxxx) is socialization. Often, this is regarded as “fluff” relative to the main content that the students are required to learn. If they are to succeed at working in a team drawn from different cultures, the members need time to learn about each other at the beginning and on an ongoing basis. The co-construction of knowledge inevitably ends being bound up with context and knowledge about each other’s background. In fact our research shows that understanding of the content is strengthened by this contextualization and by socialization.
Posted 8:00:59 AM - Friday, April9, 2004
Some global learning projects work well and result in a really worthwhile learning experience for students, while others just don’t make it. What are some of the common traps and how can you avoid them?
1. Lack of integration into learning activities.
2. Absence of reciprocity of benefits and involvement.
3. Not part of assessed outcomes.
4. Inadequate communication technology.
5. Weak relationship with overseas collaborators.
6. Absence of institutional support.
7. Lack of preparation.
8. Problems with teamwork.
9. Absence of a Model Global Learner.
10. Insufficient time for socialization.
1. Lack of integration into learning activities.
If the global learning experience is separate to the main content and activities of the course, it is unlikely to be taken seriously by the students. The best approach is to redesign the course so that for at least a part of it, the means to achieving a particular learning outcome is through the global learning activity. For example, students drawn from different countries can be asked to collaborate on the task of conducting a literature review and then reporting that both in writing and in a presentation videoconference. To work in a team well, they have to be able to communicate well and to be able to do that; they must understand each other’s perspective, which means that some global learning has occurred.
2. Absence of reciprocity of benefits and involvement.
If faculty and students at each end do not see value in the integration of global learning into the course in question, then there will be little incentive to participate. The students at each end will develop the perspectives of their counterparts through interaction as they participate in some project-based learning assignment. The development of these perspectives, and even more importantly learning how to develop those perspectives, will add significant value to any course. This of itself should be sufficient reason to incorporate global learning. A one-sided approach in which one culture is considered superior or more important is unlikely to meet with success.
Even where the aim is to conduct distance education, delivering courses from a foreign perspective with no regard for the culture of the students will be make those courses less attractive than those form an institution that has paid attention to cultural differences.
3. No change in assessment.
A course that has been transformed from a traditional format to a more constructivist and project-based learning design will be producing different learning outcomes. To know whether the students have achieved these learning outcomes, the assessment method needs to change. If the students are working in teams, then to both provide an incentive to work in a team and to measure team performance, there needs to be an assessment of team output. At the same time, peer assessment may be used to determine the individual contributions of team members toward the team goal. It is also important, when learning critical thinking.
4. Inadequate communication technology.
Sometimes, global learning experiences can remain elusive if the communication technology lets us down. This can happen at the best of times with the latest technology. However, the reality is that much of the world, especially those parts from whose people we can learn a great deal, don’t have the technology, which we take for granted. If they don’t have access to the Internet, then we can resort to simple telephone conference calls. If they don’t have a telephone, we are out of luck in terms of timely interactions. The best situation is one in which participants in each country have access to a combination of asynchronous and synchronous communication technologies such as web-based course management systems and Internet-based video conferencing. These need to be put in place to enable the required global reach.
5. Weak relationship with overseas collaborators.
A frequent question from audiences, who are hearing about global learning for the first time, is “How do we get started?” The response is invariably that global learning links are best built on existing relationships, usually associated with research collaboration or participation in professional associations or conferences. Sometimes, the relationships arise from the faculty being migrants from a particular country, where they maintain links to colleagues in their field. Medium to longer term relationships prove better, because of the amount and complexity of communication about the aims and implementation of a global learning class. Sometimes, potential collaborators can proceed with implementation after having known each other for a short time, but this is a rarity. Generally, strong existing relationships are needed to assure the success of a project, especially when you consider that the faculty members need to be role models in terms of cage painting (see http://gl.wichita.edu/biblio/).
6. Absence of institutional support
The need for extra effort on the part of the instructor, who is responsible for the course, and the need to work in teams across the institution and the need for collaboration between institutions all depends on high-level institutional support. Quite apart from the investment in enabling infrastructure, additional resources associated with the course transformation process will have to be provided. Funds need to be provided for these, plus teaching relief for the faculty and for extra teaching assistance. Aside from eventually generating growth in credit hours, faculty and staff contributions to this process need to be rewarded both in terms of tenure and promotion and inkind. Prizes and awards for outstanding achievements are additional incentives. Overall, the process is helped if there is a clear message from the institution’s leaders that the incorporation of global learning into the curriculum is an institutional priority at a rhetorical level.
7. Lack of preparation.
Implementation of a global learning experience for students in a course or program has long term benefits and cannot usually occur overnight. There is often a need for extensive communication between collaborators at different institutions and between development team members at each institution. These teams will comprise people from different areas such as education, media, computing or networking. After the planning phase, a small global learning experience, perhaps associated with one learning activity and with just one other country is implemented with a view to refining it and adding more global learning activities as the collaborators get a sense of how best to integrate global learning experiences.
There is no denying that there is extra effort involved in getting started with the integration of global learning into the curriculum. It is only the first students have gone through and the word spreads that a course has this extra value, that enrolment will go up and ultimately there will be some credit hour growth. Two to three years have to be allowed for this effect to occur. In terms of investment of extra effort, the result should be that there will be less work for each faculty member, because they are sharing the task of running the course with others.
8. Problems with teamwork.
Team work and collaboration is critical to the success of a global learning initiative. There needs to be teamwork within each participating institution as the faculty, educational advisors, media, computing and networking people work together. Students are also important team members. They can advise on whether the approach is working from their perspective. Typically, these projects see faculty collaborating between departments and colleges as well as with key staff. Then there is collaboration between institutions. Global learning actually goes on in the planning phase, long before the course starts as people from different cultures learn more about each other. Often it helps to have a formal approach to determining our preferred role, when working in a team so we can achieve complimentarity between our respective team roles. This is preferable to leaving things to chance and ending up with problems due to personality clashes.
9. Absence of a Model Global Learner.
The process of global learning is to a degree a cognitive apprenticeship. In this apprenticeship the instructor needs to model the process by interacting with their counterparts in such a way that the key steps to painting cages and developing multiple perspectives are made explicit. This needs to be authentic rather than contrived. It is always helpful if the models, who apparently have known each other for a long time, are seen to have misunderstandings and then recognize this and clear them up. This is especially important in a metacognitive sense. We want the students, the apprentice global learners, to achieve the ability to deal effectively with people from entirely new and different cultures as learning outcomes. It is not sufficient to be able to deal with people from the cultures encountered in the actual class. They must distill from this experience the strategies to deal with people from other cultures.
10. Insufficient time allocated for socialization.
A critical component of communication via computers, according to Salmon (xxxx) is socialization. Often, this is regarded as “fluff” relative to the main content that the students are required to learn. If they are to succeed at working in a team drawn from different cultures, the members need time to learn about each other at the beginning and on an ongoing basis. The co-construction of knowledge inevitably ends being bound up with context and knowledge about each other’s background. In fact our research shows that understanding of the content is strengthened by this contextualization and by socialization.
about wsu