The Global Honors College concluded its 2011 Global Seminar on August 20. This summer's seminar brought together 28 undergraduates from 8 universities in the United States and Asia. The Global Sustainability Seminar focused on a food and agriculture theme for 2011. The students began their study in June and July by participating a six-week online phase led by faculty from Columbia, the National University of Singapore, Waseda University and the University of Washington. During the online phase of the seminar, CCNMTL worked with the faculty to leverage interactive synchronous and asynchronous technologies and to plan course units and assignments that maximized interaction among this global group of students.

In August, the group convened in Singapore for the onsite phase of the seminar, including Ashlinn Quinn representing CCNMTL. This year's onsite phase was hosted by the National University of Singapore at its brand-new UTown campus. The onsite phase was a period of intensive work and study where multidisciplinary student teams conducted research into prevailing issues in the sustainability of global food and agriculture systems. Our NUS hosts arranged informative field trips so that students could get an in-depth view into the local issues affecting food, agriculture, and sustainability in Singapore. Students visited a marine aquaculture center, a governmental public health/food testing laboratory, a vegetable farm, and several natural reserves where Singapore's native forest and fauna were protected from development.

For their final projects, teams of students created research presentations that focused on specific topics in the sustainability of food systems. In their work, they incorporated their own definitions of sustainability into presentations that merged research summaries with policy recommendations. The presentations' topics included the salmon industry in British Columbia, the future of rice farming in sub-saharan Africa, the oil palm industry, and the sustainability of food waste management systems.

The website for the seminar – which paired traditional course management capability with interactive tools like microblogging and video commenting using GoingOn.com's LMS – contains narrated copies of these presentations as well as records of the ample work students completed in the online phase of the seminar.