Global Online Learning Exchange (GOLE)
Students Explore Museum Artifacts & Develop Intercultural Competence
Intercultural Competence (IC) in hands-on projects within the virtual exchange environment encompasses teaching and learning practices that connect locally dispersed teachers and students to learn and work together fostering their intercultural competence in hands-on projects. Such collaborative projects provide an exciting opportunity for faculty to build on existing academic and research connections that one has with colleagues at other institutions located outside of the United States and to forge new ones and develop new opportunities for students.
GOLE Partners with University College Dublin to Create Research Opportunities
The overarching goals of our GOLE project focused on comparing US and Irish educational datasets and evaluating how data collection informs educational policy both nationally and internationally.
Analysis of an International Business in the GOLE Program
Students from St. John’s worked together with their international peers in small groups. The project focused on an international business that students chose and analyzed, combining microeconomic variables and basic accounting documents.
GOLE Faculty Experiences
In fall 2019, I implemented my GOLE project in one graduate level course in the School of Education focusing on designing and integrating learning technologies in classrooms.
After a year-long planning period, my GOLE project was designed around the theme of cross-cultural instructional design with learning technologies. Pre-service teachers at St. John’s University worked collaboratively with partners at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China, on a 10-week-long instructional design project.Each team consisted of approximately two St. John’s graduate students and four or five graduate students from the international partner university. The main task for the virtual teams was to design and develop an interdisciplinary unit for middle school students in two metropolitan cities in both countries, by researching and creating lesson plans that would employ particular technological applications in classroom teaching. The project guidelines required virtual team members to work as communities of practice to design an interdisciplinary unit for middle school students in both countries while simultaneously learning to use various online web- based and mobile-supported technologies in order to collaborate effectively. Students cultivated their cross-cultural competencies throughout the course. Many team members became great life friends after the project.
Being a course-based international exchange that does not require student travel, GOLE project allows St. John’s students who cannot study abroad or travel due to financial and other challenges. This virtual exchange experience became more valuable in the global COVID-19 situation where travel and health concerns rise worldwide. Without traveling to different international places, St. John’s students can collaborate and learn with their peers from around the world.
Language and Culture Virtual Exchange Builds Intercultural Competencies for GOLE Students
Zoe Petropoulou, Ph.D., Associate Professor of French, Department of Languages and Literatures, collaborated with colleagues from the University of Nantes and the University of Bordeaux in France to connect students studying French on St. John’s Queens, NY, campus with their peers in France studying Sociology/Psychology and English as part of the Global Online Learning Exchange (GOLE) program.
“This initiative is not just a peripheral project for a language and culture class,” she said. “It is aligned with St. John’s University’s mission to promote international education through global attitudes, knowledge, and intercultural skills, and includes everyone—even the students who cannot participate in traditional study abroad.”
Over two months, in course-embedded synchronous and asynchronous sessions, students worked together in small groups. They engaged in broad linguistic and cultural experiences and compared responses from interviews they conducted in both French- and English-speaking communities on different topics connected to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals such as global health, the effects of COVID on young people, climate change, and discrimination.
“These courses aim to provide a forum for students for cultural and linguistic exchange where they share cultural activities and experiences and compare points of views from both countries,” Dr. Petropoulou explained.