Global and Distance Learning Initiative

Global Honors College

Partner(s): Kevin Griffin
Global Honors College

Access: Columbia only
Released: June 2010

CCNMTL played a key role in the design, development, and implementation of the 2010 Global Seminar hosted by the Global Honors College, an inter-institutional program organized by Waseda University (Tokyo) that convenes faculty and undergraduate students from leading universities worldwide to conduct joint, structured, and sustained investigations of enduring and emerging global issues. The Global Honors College selects highly motivated undergraduate students from nine universities--including Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Peking, Korea, and Waseda, and others--to participate in the Global Seminar, an annual, summer-long intensive course in which participants collaboratively research, debate, and document a specific topic; the 2010 Global Seminar focused on the subject of "sustainability." The seminar began with a two-month online phase followed by an "onsite" phase in Tokyo in which students and faculty met for a rigorous three-week period.

Project Details

CCNMTL educational technologists worked closely with the Global Honors College organizers and faculty partners to understand the needs of the Global Seminar and to design a sequence of learning activities that would engage students at a distance and better prepare them for the intensive, in-person phase in Tokyo. In order to meet these needs, CCNMTL selected a platform to merge the functionality of a traditional course management system with capabilities more typically associated with social networking services, including content sharing, interactivity around multimedia, and blogging. The platform is supported by additional services for collaborative writing, presentations, and bibliographic reference collection.

The platform was in launched in June 2010 to coincide with the start of the 2010 Global Seminar. CCNMTL provided ongoing training and support to faculty and students as they utilized the platform and embedded tools throughout the seminar, beginning with a sequence of web-based learning modules on a range of topics related to sustainability, including biodiversity, economics and policy, and humanistic perspectives.

Upon the conclusion of the summer program, CCNMTL began working with Global Honors College faculty and staff to plan the next iteration of the Global Seminar in 2011, which built on the technical platform implemented in summer 2010.

The Global Honors College received funding from the Japanese Ministry of Education and from Columbia College.