Opening up the possibilities of online education abroad

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated higher education’s emergency shift to online instruction. Education abroad was no exception, with programmes pivoting to virtual education abroad. We propose to rebuild virtual education abroad, making it a more positive, productive student experience, naturally different from traditional education abroad.

When thousands of American students had their education abroad programmes suddenly interrupted, many institutions and their education abroad programme provider partners quickly moved to online learning to continue their programmes. Some institutions and organisations have already developed virtual education abroad and internships to be offered in summer 2020.

It is likely that such models will become a regular student option into the future, providing students with a virtual experience of being abroad.

Traditional education abroad is essentially based on the binary dynamic of ‘here’ and ‘there’. However, in the shift to virtual education abroad this binary relationship no longer acts in the same way. Virtual education abroad should not be a matter of trying to replicate the experience of living and learning in another culture.

Online learning and its underlying technologies can go only so far to replace what is missed when a student is not immersed abroad. Even trying to recreate the way in which a student has an embodied understanding of a foreign location misses unique opportunities of online learning, ones that bring a completely novel way of understanding a complex set of unfamiliar experiences from a distance.

Interdisciplinarity

Instead, we suggest that the guiding framework for virtual education abroad should be based on the idea that the online experience creates its own unique, intensified culture – one in which students engage and learn in ways that are not always possible even during actual education abroad.

For example, a student online has the ability to press a literal pause button on the experience, and automatically link what is being studied with resources that explain at once and simultaneously its dimensionality of meaning and application spanning across disciplines to places, cultural artefacts, historic sites, roads, art and linking to history, sociology, news and literature.

This poly-dimensional dynamic introduces to education abroad an interdisciplinarity that is not readily captured even with live encounters that usually deal only with what is directly heard and seen.

As an example of poly-dimensional study abroad, imagine an online course of study focused on the inter-relationship among income inequality, pandemics, class conflict, climate change, global trade and the challenge to the existing social and political order by contrasting contemporary Greece with that of one of its past civilisations – Mycenae.

Commentators such as Annalee Newitz are, indeed, making the case that much can be learned by comparing ancient cultures such as Mycenae with our own when all these factors are in play and interacting dramatically.

Rather than just a passive read about the proposition in a one-dimensional lecture, text or video, imagine a student having available (or being guided by faculty assisted perhaps by personal learning analytics) a multitude of associations simultaneously available in a variety of media and academic disciplines that bring the learning vividly to imagination.

Theories about the fall of Mycenae could be compared and contrasted, for example, by interviews with a variety of Greek contemporaries – to include host country students – active in various political, cultural and social organisations; by a wealth of data on all aspects of ancient and contemporary Greece, to include differences in culinary habits, housing, entertainment, education and healthcare between the general population and the wealthy elite; by presentations and interactions with scholars from a wide variety of disciplines; by the presentation of cultural artefacts with possible import to the topic at hand, many held in local and national museums; and by virtual tours curated by faculty that take students on walks through Mycenaean and contemporary Greek destinations that take into account diverse student interests and frames of reference.

All those inter-relating sources of knowledge and experience would be offered at once to students. Such an approach raises the question of whether online poly-dimensional learning changes understanding of a culture beyond that normally available in traditional linear learning by causing a student to absorb stimuli in greater contrast and with more immediacy.

Characteristics of this poly-dimensional education abroad framework might include:

• Study and discussion of the online poly-dimensional culture. Poly-dimensional education abroad offers a unique opportunity to address the various lenses afforded by online learning, lenses that frame windows simultaneously onto the culture, society and nation. Each engagement with an online experience is also a cultural experience.

Poly-dimensional education abroad should address how cultures shape the online experience and how the online experience, in turn, shapes cultures and the understanding of cultures.

What are the ways in which this poly-dimensional learning enhances and alters the understanding of the culture, society, nation by such technology-enabled contextualisation and interdisciplinarity? How does the online experience ‘flatten’ cultures? How does it both conceal and reveal cultural characteristics?

• Increased accessibility, diversity and inclusion. Poly-dimensional education abroad should make institutions better able to make education abroad more accessible and inclusive, providing global learning experiences to an increased number of diverse students with a wider variety of entry points to the international experience.

In this way, education abroad learning can be enriched through the interactions of more diverse cohorts of students, each applying their diverse backgrounds to address a diversely mediated object of interest. Discussions could focus on diversity issues within the education abroad host location as well as differences in how students experience the poly-dimensional culture and enrich, thereby, the total learning experience.

• The critical role of faculty. Online poly-dimensional education abroad will require a creative shift to a new form of faculty-led courses and programmes. Faculty will, of course, bring their subject matter expertise to course design and delivery, and whenever possible draw upon their research and academic networks to enhance course content.

However, they will also be expected to interpret for students and guide them through the multitude of perspectives emerging at once from the subject of study. Interdisciplinarity and diversity of perspective are essential to poly-dimensional education abroad. Faculty will play a central role in guiding students to understanding the poly-dimensional culture that they experience and how it is both familiar and unfamiliar.

• Academic credit. A perennial challenge for education abroad is how to count contact hours. It is established and accepted that much of education abroad learning occurs in structured ways in an ‘environmental classroom’ not restricted by four walls and institutions have developed effective models to count education abroad contact hours.

In the same way, institutions will need new ways to apply students’ virtual time in the mediated culture. For example, the professor-led virtual excursion through a migrant refugee camp in contemporary Greece could count as ‘class time’ just as it might for a student on an actual excursion walking through the area, observing and conversing with both inhabitants and administrators to understand what in fact is the case.

As a high impact educational practice, education abroad at its deepest level has the potential to transform students. Encountering differences and navigating the challenges of being in an international environment necessitates students to be resourceful, adaptable and resilient.

Poly-dimensional education abroad, whether totally online or via blended learning, can be structured to present challenges to students that contribute to this kind of personal growth. Further, and perhaps most importantly, it introduces them to a way of learning that demands at once a wide variety of perspectives to be understood and rejects superficial, one-dimensional understanding.

Brian J Whalen is international education leadership fellow at the University at Albany, United States; dean’s fellow at Dickinson College; and former president and CEO of The Forum on Education Abroad. William G Durden is president, International University Alliance; courtesy professor (research), School of Education, Johns Hopkins University; and president emeritus, Dickinson College, United States.