In December 2024, Indiana University Indianapolis and Ivy Tech Community College submitted the final report on the Department of Education’s $310,000 Building Global Pathways grant.
Led by Associate Vice Chancellor and Associate Vice President for International Affairs Hilary Kahn alongside Director of Curriculum Internationalization Leslie Bozeman and Grant Specialist Lauren Jobe, the overarching goal of this initiative was to strengthen the fundamental global learning curricular foundations at Ivy Tech Community College and IU Indianapolis over the course of the four years.
The team focused on the foundational curriculum of first-year coursework at the two institutions, targeting both content and professional development of instructors and career advisors. The project included developing an online global learning curriculum for first-year seminars, which included a module on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a well-attended global learning symposium, the integration of global learning into freshman and transfer orientation, and study abroad funding for students transferring from Ivy Tech to IU Indianapolis.
Between 2020 and 2024, three cohorts of 42 faculty teaching freshman seminars were involved in specific global learning training through workshops that introduced instructors to global learning pedagogy and the modules that were developed to support this work at both institutions. 36 language instructors attended workshops around high-impact world language learning with new language acquisition expert Richard Donato, and 63 career and academic advisors attended workshops about how to support global pathways for students. Further, 120 faculty and staff from IU and other Indiana higher education institutions attended the culminating Global Learning Symposium.
To assess the outcomes of the work, the team worked with Thomas P. Miller and Associates (TPMA) as an external evaluator. TPMA administered a First Year Seminar survey for three years of our project. The goal was to get student perspectives on the internationalized coursework and assess future plans. A total of 314 IU Indy students and 697 Ivy Tech students were surveyed in the resulting final report.
The majority of IU Indianapolis students reported that the course resulted in an increased interest in global topics, including a large change in how often they interact with people from different backgrounds and also in their awareness of how everyday life is influenced by globalization. The third IU Indianapolis student cohort was surveyed about the SDGs and 78% reported that learning about the SDGs increased their awareness of global issues at home and abroad. IU Indianapolis students also indicated they were likely to seek information about international internships and study abroad.
For Ivy Tech students, 52% said they were likely to take a world language course after taking the global module in their freshman seminar with 47% of students saying they were likely to pursue global careers. The program’s demonstrated success led the Association of International Education Administrators to award IU Indianapolis the 2023 Innovation Award in Internationalization.
TPMA also assisted with exploring future enrollment of students who took the internationalized freshman seminars. Because of the limited timeframe of the grant, enrollment trends did not change as a whole, but there were significant changes by discipline and ethnicity: Liberal Arts and Public and Environmental Affairs students who were in the global seminars took more global courses in the future than the control group. Further, the FYS global learning appeared to have had a stronger impact on future “global” course enrollment of Black and Hispanic students, as well as students from two or more races than it did on White and Asian students.
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