A Virtual Educational Exchange

Abstract

Increasingly, international competence is considered an important skill to be acquired from an undergraduate education. Because international exchange presents a challenge to many students, there is a need to develop and implement alternative means for incorporating international and cross-cultural experiences into the undergraduate classroom. We report on the implementation of a semester-long, virtually shared course offering between a U.S. and a Bolivian university. As STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) majors tend to be under-represented in study-abroad programs, this class sought to provide a multidisciplinary experience that could be relevant to both hard and social science majors. Furthermore, the relevance and learning impact of this class was enhanced through the incorporation of a service-learning component in conjunction with a rural Bolivian partner organization. The results of this experience show that virtually shared classroom experiences can successfully facilitate international experiences for undergraduate students.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.