What does a virtual exchange look like when it is combined with a first-year seminar class? Watch this short video explaining how the two high impact practices were combined to create one amazing experience for our first semester freshmen!
Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL): The Holland-America Line
We last shared insight from our Newcastle partner. This time we welcome our other partner, Dr. Kim Braun, a lecturer at Nutrition and Dietetics at The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS) in the Netherlands.
Internationalization is an important theme of THUAS and one of our main goals is to educate our students to become global citizens. At the same time, inclusiveness is something to strive for as well. Not all activities related to internationalization lend itself for inclusive learning. For instance, not everyone has the opportunity to go abroad.
Therefore, we have designed our Nutrition and Dietetics curriculum to be as inclusive as possible when it comes to internationalization, with internationalization at home, for instance, by doing a COIL assignment. We learned that when making this assignment optional, those who might benefit the most would not participate. Therefore we made it mandatory for all our first year students to complete a COIL assignment.
IUPUI is one of the COIL partners for our first-year students. We start off with an online kick-off with both classes. After the kick-off they will collaborate in couples or small groups starting with an online meeting to get to know each other. Then they work on an assignment in which assumptions are addressed about each other’s countries when it comes to food habits or nutrition-related health issues. After discussing these assumptions with each other, they will go fact-checking, which often surprises them. They work on this assignment by having several online meetings and finally record a presentation.
The majority of students said they really enjoyed this course and the collaboration with a student abroad. They even preferred to have spent more time on COIL because they said it was so much fun!
The main feedback we received was that time is an issue. Besides the amount of time reserved for this assignment, they were also often struggling with time differences. Still, students worked around this issue, with some even agreeing to meet extremely early or very late! Some students recorded their presentation while traveling, while others met in the middle of the night to make sure they could meet and have time to talk to their partner.
The organization of COIL can be challenging, but the outcomes really make it worthwhile and contribute to our goal to educate global citizens. Through this assignment, they are able to develop their communication skills in a different language. They showed how much they learned and how prejudice was dissolved after collaborating with someone abroad. They enlightened not only their partners but me as well by presenting really interesting facts about their country. Some just connected really well with each other and formed new friendships. And all of them amazed me by the growth they showed in developing as a global citizen in such a short amount of time.
Curriculum Internationalization in Action at IUPUI
IUPUI is committed to providing all students with at least one meaningful international experience.
One way to accomplish this is through curriculum internationalization, defined as:
“The incorporation of international, intercultural, and/or global dimension into the content of the curriculum as well as the learning outcomes, assessment tasks, teaching methods, and support services of a program of study.” (Leask, 2015)
Read more about the virtual exchange experience in Lamia Scherzinger’s class in this profile!
Newcastle University’s Virtual Exchange Experience
While we have shared an initial introduction to what a virtual exchange is from the IUPUI side, it’s important to remember that this is also being driven and experienced by our international partners. Here is Dr. Anthony Watson, Lecturer in the School of Biomedical, Nutritional and Sports Sciences at Newcastle University, sharing his school’s reasoning for participating in our exchange.
Food is an essential part of everyone’s life. On the most primitive level we need food and good nutrition to survive and (hopefully) thrive. However, food also plays a key role in our identities and our traditions. It is used as a tool for socializing and for comfort and our food choices are driven by a multitude of factors such as upbringing, faith, culture, and the geographical locations which we live.
As we educate nutrition and dietetics students on the importance of good nutrition for growth, maintenance, and the prevention of ill health and disease, we also need them to understand that many factors drive our food choices and food patterns. They need to understand that “one size does not fit all” and we cannot make recommendations with achievable goals to improve health or manage conditions if we do not take food choice into consideration.
Throughout their degrees, nutrition and dietetics students at Newcastle University will have the opportunity to interact with people from different religions, cultures and geographical locations. This is facilitated through Q and A sessions, lectures and initially through a virtual international exchange.
International Exchange
To help our students understand how our geographical location impacts our food choice, we have integrated a virtual exchange with Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) into one of our key first year modules – Introduction to human nutrition (NUT1002). This module is taken by nutrition and dietetics students and aims to provide an overview of nutrition and health and give students an understanding of how social and cultural factors are related to nutrition.
The exchange is between Newcastle University students and their peers of a similar age in the USA. Students are set various tasks throughout the 8-week exchange where they interact through video conferencing and discussion boards to discuss what foods they eat and why they eat them. The exchange finishes with a 5-minute presentation about the similarities and differences between their diet in relation to their peers in America. The presentation makes the students reflect on the reasons for these differences.
The overall purpose of the exchange is to give students a foundation understanding of why we eat what we do. This understanding is then used as a scaffold to teach more complex aspects of food choice and their impacts on how health professionals consider individual differences when making dietary recommendations.
What is a Virtual Exchange?
Study abroad is a term many of us have heard and some of us have even taken part in. It has a major emphasis at many schools, as it is often encouraged that students gain international experience at some point in their academic careers. Long considered a high-impact practice, study abroad can be an eye-opening, enriching, enlightening experience and one that can academically, professionally, and personally sets students apart. However, due to the financial burden, time constraints, and other limiting resources, many IUPUI students may never experience one. Also, with pandemic worries and past traveling restrictions, further constraints have been placed upon our students for any study abroad opportunities.
This is where virtual exchanges come in. A virtual exchange is an education program that uses technology to allow geographically separated people to interact and communicate. It increases cultural understanding, global citizenship, digital literacies, and international learning, all done at no extra cost to the class! It is primarily made up of three parts:
- The initial meeting of the two partnering institutions, done synchronously or asynchronously, using either a video conferencing tool or some sort of discussion board. Icebreakers work nicely here, as it allows the students to get to know each other in a fun, more personal way.
- Learning activity: This can be done by students meeting and discussing a topic related to their courses, taking part in online discussions, and/or reading literature to gain more information.
- The students then create a course asset, which can include a paper, poster, video, presentation, website, social media campaign, or any other artifact that showcases what they have learned over the previous weeks of the virtual exchange.
More in-depth detail on these three aspects can be learned in this presentation.
The purpose of this blog is to showcase the virtual exchanges that are taking place in the School of Health and Human Sciences KINE N220 Nutrition for Health course since Fall 2020. Through a fall partnership with the United Kingdom and a spring partnership with the Netherlands, students have been able to participate in this high-impact practice, showcase their digital literacy skills, and partake in cultural and global learning that will create more informed, engaged, and global literate professionals.