The Wiley Handbook of Collaborative Online Learning and Global Engagement

15 Best Practices for Collaborative Online Learning and Global Engagement

Irene López¹ and Deirdre Johnston²

¹Kenyon College, USA

²Hope College, USA

By now, we hope we have convinced you that effective globally-connected courses are a useful way to help students learn about the world, and in the process, learn about themselves. The globally-connected courses project, the extensive student assessment of these courses, and the individual course case studies presented in this volume showcase the various factors that are critical in the development of global learning and citizenship. As much as these case studies inspire new ideas for course design and assignments, they also illuminate opportunities to develop more immersive and transformative global learning experiences. In this chapter we provide a new model of global engagement that outlines best practices on collaborative online learning and global engagement based on the contributions to this volume who teach globally-connected courses either through the Global Liberal Arts Alliance (henceforth GLAA) or other global partnerships. The recommendations presented here also reflect the feedback from 560 students who were enrolled in globally-connected courses through the GLAA and participated in our quantitative assessment study (see Chapter 3).

A New Model of Global Engagement and Learning

Although there is a growing body of research on the various correlates and predictors of global learning, to our knowledge, there are few, ...