The Wiley Handbook of Collaborative Online Learning and Global Engagement

9 What Do These Students Think of Us? Managing Intergroup Anxiety in a Virtually-Connected Course

Irene López¹ and Wejdan Felmban²

¹ Kenyon College, USA

² Effat University, Saudi Arabia

A key goal in the teaching of cross-cultural psychology is helping students learn about the experiences of others. But how do we help students learn about others if they do not, or cannot, leave the classroom? And how do we teach about others without othering or minimizing cultural differences? Such were the questions that we, psychology professors living on opposite sides of the world, faced when we were asked to teach a course on cross-cultural psychology at our respective institutions. In what follows, we outline the goals, impact, and logistics of a virtually-connected course, between Kenyon College, a co-ed small liberal arts college in rural Ohio in the USA, and Effat University, an all-women’s private university in the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. We describe assignments that were geared toward helping students appreciate cultural differences, as per the AAC&U Global VALUE Learning Rubric (2015), while trying to manage the anxiety of students as they get to know one another.

Importance of Global Learning

Briefly defined, cross-cultural psychology is the scientific study of how culture influences human behavior. In a typical cross-cultural psychology course, students are presented with a wide array of information about the diversity of human experience in order to broaden their knowledge ...