Overall Description: The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA ,and the European University at St,. Petersburg, Russia are currently pursuing a long-term, global, distance learning project, entitled the Global Classroom Project. Co-directors of the project are Yuri Tretyakov, Director of the Language Center at the European University, St. Petersburg, Russia, Kenneth Knoespel, Associate Dean of International Programs in Ivan Allen College and Professor in History, Science, and Technology and the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, and TyAnna Herrington, Assistant Professor of Technical Communication in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. The project was originally funded by Herrington's Fulbright grant, that led to its further development during her teaching appointment at the European University during fall 1999. Herrington, Tretyakov, and Knoespel have also submitted a proposal for a $300,000 University Partnership Grant from the United States Department of State that would further fund the project over the next three years. The pilot version of the Global Classroom Project was successfully undertaken in 2000. The course provided a forum in which faculty and students at Georgia Tech and the European University participated in digital classes to support discussion, information-sharing, and collaboratively developed projects. The intent of the Global Classroom Project is to study, in practical application, how to develop effective cross-cultural, digital communication in subject-specific areas such as history, sociology, and political science. The assignments are centered on student development of hard copy and digital communication produced for course goals to be shared with students at the European University in St. Petersburg. Both in subject area study and experientially, students explored issues in these areas, analyzed them, and reported the results of their research, experience, and assessment of specific communication issues identified during work on the project. [see http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~herrington/gcp/index.html.] The quality of their work depended on their ability to determine the most effective means to communicate accurately, clearly, and effectively in the form of resumes, proposals, analytical reports, and a web project report site. The project utilized WWW conferencing software as a tool to enable what would be impossible without it; as such, digital communication is used to focus on class goals rather than the technology itself. The pilot course, developed from a foundation of long-term interaction between our universities, formed the basis for further development of the project in the future.
No Lecture Course-in-the-Box: It is important to us that our use of technology does not follow the pattern of often ill-conceived distance learning projects that repackage lectures or correspondence courses through televideo, CD ROM, or WWW information sites. In contrast, we plan to continue to use technology supported pedagogy to enable cross-curricular discussion, research, and information-sharing in order to further scholarship. We hope to use technology intelligently, as a tool to connect ideas and information among students and scholars rather than focusing on technology as an end in itself.
Project History: Since 1991, faculty and administrators at Georgia Tech and the Russian Academy of Sciences/the European University have enjoyed a strongly supported administrative and scholarly exchange, with 6 American and 6 Russian professors teaching humanities courses and participating in workshops in partner institutions. In 1993, Knoespel, then Director of LCC at Georgia Tech, became an international advisor to the Organizing Committee of the European University, which was formally inaugurated in 1994 under the auspices of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Knoespel received a USIA grant in 1994 to develop work in Scientific and Technical Communication between Georgia Tech and the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Georgia Tech's administration supported Herrington's appointment as Fulbright professor at the European University by providing funded leave during the fall semester of 1999 to teach courses in Technical Communication and English and to develop the project. Tretyakov visited Georgia Tech in 1992, 1993, and 1996 as Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages, Russian Academy of Sciences and as Director of the Language Center at the European University. He is teaching courses in Communication and Russian at Georgia Tech in the spring semester of 2000, also through Georgia Tech administrative support.
Project Objectives: Our overall objective is to establish a digital global classroom as a forum in which our universities can share courses and seminars. Since the primary language of instruction will be English, we anticipate that students and faculty at the European University will improve their language skills. However, we underscore that our objective is not to create a language-lab but to establish a digital classroom that will allow students and faculty to undertake collaborative research within a cross-cultural setting.
We anticipate that the digital global classroom will permit us to study the issues that emerge as students and faculty begin to interact in multicultural and multilingual digital settings. For example, we expect to study the importance of traditional cultural convention in new forms of communication. Considered together, we think that this project contributes to an anthropology of digital communication within a cross-cultural setting. Thus, the project will be a tool to help cultures learn how to communicate with each other, while simultaneously fostering effective collaboration among faculty and students in order to deepen the long and close relationship between our universities.
General Benefits to US and Russia: Since upon graduating, many students participating in the project on both sides will work for government and major international corporations, they will be able to contribute their unique experience in this communication environment based on multicultural awareness, understanding, and respect for other nations as well as the use of advanced technology.
General Benefits to Our Universities: We hope to make curricular changes that would affect both universities long into the future. Where computing facilities and availability at Georgia Tech are currently adequate to support the goals of the project, those at the European University are not. We have applied for grants that would provide funding to purchase computer technology to equip the European University with a classroom dedicated to the project and eventually create a School of Languages, Computers, and Communication.
In addition, in the event that our grant applications are accepted, students and faculty at Georgia Tech, the European University, and its affiliates will be supported by travel exchange to attend workshops in which participants will develop the project itself as well as joint research and teaching projects that will form the basis for collaborative conference presentations, article and book publications, and further joint educational projects.
These workshops will also provide a means to carefully monitor the progress of the project by adjusting according to outcomes determined by the assessment portion of the project.
Benefits to Georgia Tech: In addition to benefiting students with a strong foundation of experiential learning for developing skills and insights into communication issues, the project will also provide the foundation for a global communication center that would benefit the whole of the institute at Georgia Tech. Both specific and general goals of the project support Georgia State Board of Regents' and university's objectives to pursue global, technology supported, cross-curricular education.
Benefits to the European University: European University Rector, Boris Firsov, has called for curricular restructuring by proposing that the project become the basis for a new minor certificate in English and computer skills in the short term, and a new School of Languages, Computers, and Communication in the long term. To help effectuate this plan, the project will provide contacts for the European University with Georgia Tech and other major US universities both in education and research. It will provide new courses in communication and culture, enhanced courses of English, and a deepening of interdisciplinary education and research.
Benefits to "Provincial" Russia and the NIS: In addition, the project will provide broader links inside the NIS, including those with students and faculty from Belarus and Moldova, as well as a model for introducing computer-assisted education and research inside the European University and Russia as a whole by supporting current exchange and computer digital links with partner universities in Petrozavodsk, Novgorod, and Samara.