June 7, 2010. The Global Honors College (GHC) launched last week after a year of collaborating with CCNMTL on the design, development, and implementation of an innovative online course. The GHC is an inter-institutional program that brings together faculty and students from leading universities worldwide in an undergraduate level course dedicated to conducting joint, structured, and sustained investigations of enduring and emerging global issues. It was started in 2008 by Waseda University (Tokyo) and funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education and Columbia University, and has grown to include faculty experts and select students from universities including Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Yale, the University of Washington, Waseda University, Korea University, Peking University, and National University of Singapore.

The central focus of the GHC is its Global Seminar—an annual summer-long intensive course in which highly motivated students are brought together online and in person to research, debate, and document an issue of global concern; this year's issue is sustainability. The seminar begins with a two-month online phase followed by an "onsite" phase in which students and professors meet for a rigorous three-week period in Tokyo.

For the past year, CCNMTL has played an integral role in providing curricular and pedagogical support to the GHC. Working closely with GHC organizers and faculty, the Center helped design learning modules that engage students at a distance and provide students with lectures and discussions from professors around the world. Columbia Professor and Global Seminar Instructor Kevin Griffin, for instance, is teaching the first month of the seminar from his research post in the middle of the Alaskan Tundra.

The GHC learning modules also help prepare and acquaint students for when they meet in Tokyo to complete the seminar's final phase. By giving these international students from the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and engineering the opportunity to discuss and debate issues of global concern both electronically and in person, the GHC aims to facilitate the creation of a network of future global leaders.

Additionally, CCNMTL advised and helped design the web-based platform that supports the online portion of the seminar. The selected platform built by GoingOn Networks integrates social media tools into any community of practice, in this case the seminar itself. A number of student activities—including blogging, content sharing, and interactivity around multimedia—will be based around the available social media tools in the platform. CCNMTL has also implemented pedagogical tools such as VoiceThread, an annotation system that will be used to create student introductions and serve as the means for delivering slide-based lectures, and Moodle, a learning management system that will be used to organize course materials and assignments.

The new online platform coincided with the launch of the seminar on June 1, 2010. CCNMTL is supporting faculty and student use of the program's online components, and working with GHC faculty to adapt curricula to an online format for future courses. Learn more about the Global Honors College, which is a project within the Global Learning Initiative.