COIL Activities

August - Distance Learning Summer School - Crimea, Ukraine

Submitted by admin on Tue, 08/21/2007 - 15:27

Engagement -> Cooperation -> Collaboration -> Partnership?

View Towards Mali Mayak, site of Distance Learning Summer School

Following upon a March meeting in Albany with an educational delegation from the Ukraine, a summer school in distance learning was established near Yalta for late July. Molly Mott of SUNY/Canton and Jon Rubin of the COIL Center joined with organizer Svetlana Shmelova to engage 17 faculty members and administrators from the Ukraine in a discussion of current methodologies and paths towards possible collaboration. It took some time for us all to adapt to temperatures hovering just under 100 fahrenheit degrees every day, but the sea was nearby and we met together productively for almost two weeks, and it our hope that another school might take place again next year.

Molly Mott in Class

SUNY/Canton provided a Blackboard shell in which we could work and participants used the discussion board as a tool for sharing ideas while exploring sequential collaboration through their participation in a group story writing exercise. Although the participants entered with very varying degrees of experience in distance education and ranged from students to rectors, we were able to work together quite well, although language issues did sometimes limit communication. Interestingly, this led to further discussion of online language education as a possible focus for future cooperation.

Svetlana Smelova, Summer School Organizer at Opening Reception
June 26 - Virtual University Conference, Warsaw

Submitted by jonrubin on Wed, 06/27/2007 - 18:38

Warsaw University

The Problem with "Collaboration"

Sometimes we take for granted the meaning of a word we use often and don't realize it may have a different meaning for others. Last week I presented the COIL Center to a plenary session of the Virtual University Conference at Warsaw University. After I spoke and was prepared to answer questions about what I had just presented, an audience member asked why we included the word "Collaboration" in our Center's name? Before I could answer, he stated how negatively this word reads in Eastern Europe given the hated role that "Collaborators" have played in the history of that region. I'm not convinced that we need to formally change our name because of this interpretation, but this interaction does make clear how history and culture shape meaning. And as most people simply know us as: "The COIL Center," anyone who is uncomfortable with "Collaboration" should feel free to read the "C" as indicating "Cooperative," in keeping with the intended meaning of our name.

Upbringing

Another unexpected aspect of this three-day conference was the focus on student "upbringing" or student socialization, and concerns about potential problems with distance learning in this regard. The leader of the session, Ryszard Tadeusiewicz, focused on this subject and expressed particular concern about the loss of flesh and blood faculty members as living role models for students in the online environment while others in attendance countered that this format gave students more opportunity to construct their own meaning and not be so beholden to an authority figure. In general, I learned that this socializing aspect of education seemed more accepted as being a faculty responsibility by this gathering than I have found at similar conferences at SUNY, like the recent CIT2007.

Ryszard Tadeusiewicz speaking

Virtual Universities

An idea that seems to be gaining great currency in Europe are networked (virtual) universities as a way of delivering courses and even entire programs. The first conference plenary session was delivered by Rolf Granow of the Baltic Sea Virtual Campus which links universities in eight countries and has begun creating entire degree programs that share courses between 13 universities located in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia: http://www.oncampus.de/index.php?id=60&L=1.

I also learned about the new Polish Virtual University which links universities in six Polish cities with a similar synergistic intent: http://www.puw.pl/english/. There is even a virtual university within the large and sprawling Warsaw University, itself, intended to be a better way to physically and pedagogically connect diverse programs. We at SUNY should learn something from these European models and thereby create better networks through which our campuses can share resources and work more closely together.

Visitors Networking Near the Conference
June 15 - Tec de Monterrey

Submitted by jonrubin on Wed, 06/13/2007 - 22:48

Tecnologico de Monterrey opened its Virtual University 17 years ago, at first working by satellite before there was an Internet. This secondary, post-secondary and graduate school is primarily focused on the Spanish-speaking world, but also offers a few courses in English and has developed an online digital library to support its offerings.

I recently visited both the Virtual University and the Tec de Monterrey campus to discuss their collaboratively developing courses with SUNY and I am hopeful that this will take shape fairly quickly, and there is some additional incentive with the Unesco supported Forum Monterrey due to open in September. You can find out more about the Virtual University at:www.tecvirtual.com.mx