While You Were Sleeping: Realising the Dream of International Collaborative Teaching

Abstract

Collaborative teaching between two or more geographically distant universities is possible. Informed by global trends, we know that our future professionals and practitioners will increasingly move through different jurisdictions and cultural contexts. Twenty-first century university education can bridge the academic/practitioner divide, by using effective communication to build cross-border communities that refocus learning, teaching and innovation. This paper describes the construction of partnerships and collaboration, considers the importance of quality assurance arrangements and poses challenging questions about how these collaborative partnerships can be developed, maintained and taken further. We wanted to provide students with a stimulating learning opportunity that prepares them to operate in international surroundings in relation to criminal justice agencies. The “Murder @” projects require students to engage in a series of online activities, and to collaborate with each other in the setting of a virtually authentic professional environment. The key focus is on teaching, learning and pedagogy framed around a narrative of how meaningful international collaboration can be achieved.

Keywords:

• international
• collaboration
• students
• wiki
• innovation

What is international collaboration?

Many universities are engaged in collaboration. But what does collaboration mean? There are numerous examples of elite universities prioritising research collaborations. One example of this is the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), a collaboration between ten world-class research universities, where sharing knowledge and resources is an important activity. Yale University and UCL (University College London – home of the famous Jeremy Bentham autoicon) have developed a collaboration called the Yale UCL Collaborative. Other international collaborators, such as Bristol University in the UK, have partnership agreements with US universities and, across the US/UK academic community, collaboration in research, publications, student and staff exchanges are now common. Focusing still on a large scale, many universities have a number of international partnerships aimed at delivering international exchanges for students. This type of activity enables universities to produce graduates with global awareness and prepares them for life in a globally integrated job market. Commitment to international collaboration typically requires institutional support, financial commitment, shared programmes of studies and enthusiastic academic partners to drive the progress of the initiative. An example of a well-funded collaboration between universities includes:

Warwick(UK) and Monash (Aus) – the first phase of their recent collaboration saw investment of £2 million (3.2 million Australian Dollars) and the creation of at least 10 joint senior academic staff.

More typical perhaps are the types of collaborative exchange programmes which throw the costs onto students. An exchange for students from the University of Cincinnati to Surrey University in the UK is advised to cost from $1,000 for the airfare and approximately $1,000 per month in room and board costs. It is likely to cost a similar amount for UK-based students wanting to study in the US and although funding may be available to offset some of the costs, this is still prohibitive to students with domestic or work commitments in their home locations.

Elsewhere in the sector, some institutions are turning to Asia as a place to develop international links, local campuses and joint degrees. Twinning degree programmes started in Malaysia almost 25 years ago and branch campuses of UK universities more recently (for example, University of Nottingham). Malaysian educational institutions collaborate with universities from the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, France and Germany. It has been argued that the underlying reality of this form of international collaboration is the competitive market of economic globalisation rather than the international learning experience (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Opposing imperatives to internationalising the student experience?

However, outside of the realm of elite universities, large investment funds and twinned collaborative degrees between universities, it is possible for smaller institutions to provide small scale, no-cost alternatives which are grounded on sound pedagogic principles unrelated to market forces (Figure 2).

Figure 2 The collaborative spectrum (source: HEFCE 2012)

Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) suggest that the types of collaborations at the ‘harder’ end of the spectrum are “usually more difficult and costly to put in place, and therefore generally involve higher risk to institutions. However, in the right circumstances they might yield greater benefits than simpler, more flexible arrangements that can be more easily unwound” (University of Cincinnati, 2013) (HEFCE 2012).

Collaborations at the soft end of the spectrum may be vulnerable to being ‘unwound’ but this does not take into account the relationships of trust that develop within small-scale informal collaborations. Byram & Feng (2004) have argued that more research ‘beyond the traditional classroom’ is needed. Rather than focusing further on the large-scale, harder end, elite collaborations mapped out above, this paper sets out a small-scale case-study solution, set within a specific discipline but one with transferable aims and outcomes.

A criminological context

In many respects criminology is perceived by some academics as one of the success stories contributing to the growth in higher education:

There has … been a dramatic increase in the number of researchers, teachers, courses, students, conferences, books and journals. As a result, criminology has – somewhat to the dismay of Cohen and many of his contemporaries – taken on the institutional paraphernalia of an autonomous discipline. (Garland 2011, cited in Loader & Sparks 2012, p4)

In recent years the expansion of criminology as an academic discipline has been little short of remarkable. (Hale et al. 2005, pxxvi)

Criminology is not a new area of study, indeed in the United States the American Society of Criminology (ASC) was founded in 1941and the British Society of Criminology (BSC) in 1959. Across the Atlantic divide, US and UK universities share similar aims within their teaching:

This course considers a range of questions relating to crime, deviance and social control; the academic study of law making, law breaking, law enforcement and the re-integration of offenders into society. Students will address a range of criminological questions, using a combination of theory and research methods. Topics include why individuals commit crime and how the key agencies that comprise the criminal justice system respond to criminal behaviour. We will consider young people, the law and the youth justice system, and how social characteristics such as gender, race and social class influence the ways in which the criminal justice system deals with offenders. (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

[The degree] focuses on the issues of crime, policing, the judiciary, corrections, juvenile justice, and crime victims. The program prepares students to assume entry level positions in various criminal justice occupations including those in law enforcement, probation and parole, correctional facilities, the courts, and private security. The degree also prepares students for graduate study. (University of West Florida, USA)

The next section of this paper examines the partnership that began between these two universities. Types of partnerships, quality assurance measures, length of partnership, and speaking the English language does not guarantee understanding of the cultural context. Collaboration within the academic community around the world now encompasses a disparate number of partners, pedagogies and models. The collaboration discussed below, demonstrates that learning experiences of real value can be constructed without much need for investing in complex technologies which may not be able to deliver the extensive promises they claim in pedagogical terms. It is not enough to have the technology, the key lies in using it intelligently.

The creation of the first iteration of the international teaching collaboration, now known as the ‘Murder @ … ?’ series, modelled the expectation we had of our students as we did not know each other, had never met, and all dialogue took place by email. Working collaboratively with someone remote from your own place of work means you do not have the conversations in the corridor or other informal exchanges of ideas. Our aim was to create interactive learning opportunities for students who were remote from each other, separated by time and space. We used the technology freely available to us, first email, then virtual learning platforms and now wikis. The ability to create international partnerships for students rested on the effectiveness of our academic collaborations. In the next sections of this paper, we discuss the development of the collaborative initiative and the challenges we faced.

Establishing, developing and maintaining collaboration

An outline of the genesis of this collaboration has been documented elsewhere (Jones et al. 2007) but a key driver was the desire to provide a low-cost international experience for all students. Many assumptions are made through the blanket application of the phrase ‘student experience’. An 18-year-old undergraduate, living away from the family home for the first time, and exercising their independence, has a very different ‘experience’ of university life compared to a 40-year-old mother of two, balancing a full-time job with part-time study. From the start, we recognised the importance of providing a way for all students to participate in the borderless criminal justice community, and so a collaborative initiative was developed in 2004 between a criminologist in Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) in the UK and a criminologist at the University of West Florida (UWF) in the US using basic information and communications technology to help develop their students’ awareness of international issues. As well as developing students’ understanding of contemporary policy and popular concerns around crime, a key aim was to enhance and develop students’ critical learning skills.

From this early project, the scheme expanded and has now delivered an international learning experience to around 3,500 students. A number of universities have been involved as the initiative developed and in 2012 the key partners were UWF and Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU). The initiative is delivered as a short, add-in component, which lasts for five weeks and requires active engagement of the students on a number of tasks relating to a crime scenario. Supported by a range of accessible materials within the shared virtual space of a wiki, students form small learning communities (typically 10 students per learning set) to tackle problems set by the academic team.

The digital divide is often cited as a barrier to international collaboration but when partners are solely based in the UK and the US this concept refers more to students’ skill bases and institutional support rather than access to computers. Indeed, the most common ‘divide’ dealt with was that of time differences. One of the most frequent comments made by students was that something had happened on the project ‘while you were sleeping’.

Collaborating with established partnerships

Setting up and encouraging collaboration among colleagues outside one’s own institution can be difficult. GCU joined this particular project following a presentation given to academic staff in Glasgow in 2007, and GCU students engaged for the first time in the e-learning forum in the following academic year, 2008–09. Making the decision to join this innovative e-learning activity was the easy part! How to do so was less easy!

One of the main pedagogic reasons why GCU was interested in joining this collaboration in criminology and criminal justice matters was to enhance the student experience through internationalising their learning: an innovative approach that would be of benefit to students. Practically, becoming a partner in the delivery of the e-projects was supported by the collaborating universities, which is key to the success of these projects – the existing partners were keen to share their knowledge and experience of delivering such projects and to provide support through that process when GCU joined. One example of this was a video produced to walk new partners through the process of joining the project. This serves to highlight the importance of good communication and respectful relations between the academics in the participating universities to develop the best opportunities for students.

As discussed above, the project now takes a wiki format for delivery to avoid the bureaucratic barriers that are inherent in many institutions around the issues of access for students who are studying in institutions external to the host university. Furthermore, this decision was informed by work of others in this field such as Ebner et al. (2008), who had reported that wikis would be an appropriate format to use in the academy as they are free, easy to access, everyone can contribute, comment and edit and a number of studies have “reported a great success of wikis in terms of active participation, collaboration and a rapidly growing content”. While wikis may overcome the institutional and access barriers, consideration also needs to be given to the student experience as many of the positive claims made for e-learning only apply if the students are able to access and use technology. One example of this is the ‘digital immigrant’ – those who were not born into a digital age – and therefore are likely to have a different relationship to and with using technology. Furthermore, language and humour don’t necessarily seamlessly cross borders therefore it is important that clear guidelines are given to the students in each participating university regarding on-line etiquette. It is also important to remind them that cultural jokes and colloquialisms may not be understood or be misunderstood by others.

While there are a number of issues that have to be given serious consideration when making the decision to join such collaboration, these challenges are not insurmountable and once they are overcome there are many positives for academics and students. The key to success is to ensure good guidance and an induction session for students immediately prior to the commencement of the projects.

Despite careful planning, one unanticipated issue was the effect highly motivated students can have on other members of the group. A few students reported that this can be difficult to deal with as other members of their groups were extremely good students and it made them feel intimidated. However, the outcomes would appear to be positive for these students as post-project analysis suggests it leads to the weaker students becoming more self-aware of their actual capabilities and of what they can achieve when they find themselves under pressure: “I was quite intimidated, but now I know what I can do if I work really hard. I would never have believed that I could do and be part of something as good as this” – the student was referring to the group wiki (Frondigoun & Jones 2011).

Indeed, there are many positives to be highlighted for academics and students in pursuing such an innovative approach to learning and teaching. For students, the structured and applied nature of the work they are required to undertake in their virtual groups goes some way towards providing an alternative approach to engaging them in learning through a flexible, enhanced teaching method, on an open-access online platform. It is, for students, a rewarding experience that fits with the current trends in curricular development, which seek to encourage pedagogical models that are innovative, are student-centred, include the use of technology where apposite, are flexible in their delivery (on and off campus), enhance the student experience, encourage them to be more autonomous in their learning, and competent problem solvers in order to raise their aspirations and develop their employability skills.

Murder© … ?

The ‘Murder@ … ?’ format marks a turning point in the existing collaboration, which had begun as an email exchange in 2004 – pairing students who were then expected to discuss topics set by the participating academics – and which had then developed into an online project hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University on their then virtual learning platform WebCT (Jones et al. 2007). The initial driver, to provide a no-cost international experience, had been joined by other guiding rationales. One of these was to challenge the hegemony of the oral lecture:

One of the fiercest criticisms of didactic teaching comes from the philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, in whose view the teacher “expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration – contents which are detached from reality … ” (Freire 1970). In Freirean pedagogy, what is needed instead is a liberating education based on “acts of cognition, not transferrals of information”; students in dialogue with the teachers, and the educational goal of “posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world”. (Jones 2007, p400)

Focusing on real-world problems is what led to the development of the embedded project, which ran from 2007 to 2009 and used WebCT as a central delivery point. But the evolution of the international collaboration was not over at this point. From this highly structured, e-learning environment, which provided resources and step-by-step instruction, the development of the ‘Murder@ … ?’ format, took a problem-solving approach, which relied much more on the students leading developments and driving the process (Frondigoun & Jones 2011). The initial principle of no-cost internationalisation still guided the collaboration but was joined by innovative delivery, the desire to relinquish control as a way of acknowledging student capacity, and a connection to potential future graduate employment. Fundamentally, we see our students as intellectually bright, engaged and professional. They deserve a rich learning experience that will equip them for their future careers and this is what we have always hoped to deliver.

The ‘Murder@ … ?’ concept began as a venture into the virtual authentic world. We considered that setting the project in an environment such as ‘Second Life’ would result in students spending too much time on deciding what their avatars would look like, while a Facebook setting felt (at that time) as too much of an invasion of social space. The wiki format was settled on as a relatively easy to use format with no costs attached to the students. Assumptions about ease of use were confirmed. Although some students approached the wiki with a level of foreboding, induction sessions in computer labs in each participating institution soon set fears aside, as the registration process and initial introductions were completed in a group setting with a friendly academic to help students find their way through the system.

The project provided students with a virtual space (the wiki), which functioned as a ‘police office’, each police office provided a closed space for 10–12 students, where they could collaborate secure in the knowledge that no-one other than these 10–12 student ‘officers’ (and the participating academics) could watch their activities, together with two pre-constructed wiki pages to help get them started. In the first wiki scenario ‘Murder@ Porto Beach?’, presented in 2010, the academics created a hypothetical scenario including investigating a murder scene, developing victim typology, gathering evidence, comparing rates of violence between the UK and the US, among other activities. For the second and third iterations, ‘Murder@ Golden Bay?’ in 2011 and ‘Murder@ Jefferson Falls?’ in 2012, their task was to investigate a murder scene, gather evidence, complete medical examiner reports, respond to media enquiries and finally to co-produce a PowerPoint® presentation to deliver their findings.

The problem-solving approach of the project also delivered a number of artefacts during the five weeks of the project, including crime scene photographs, suspect statements, muster reports from the police chief, and newspaper reports. Although that might sound like a lot of preparation, these materials can be re-purposed.

The third project, ‘Murder@ Jefferson Falls?’ utilised materials from ‘Murder@ Golden Bay?’ but employed a different crime scenario. Involvement of the students has always been central to this initiative. Students from the 2010 project produced the photographs for the 2011 project, supported by advice and guidance of a crime scene expert. Students who completed the project in 2011 were invited to develop the scenario used for the 2012 project. In 2013 the next project will be informed by the work of students who participated in the 2012 project.

The process of taking part in the ‘Murder@ … ?’ collaborations encourages students to make connections between their existing knowledge and their learning experience through active debate and personal reflection. At the end of each delivery, students were surveyed to canvass their views, whether their initial assumptions had changed (or stayed the same) and their experience of interacting across geographical and jurisdictional borders. Students demonstrated their adaptability, their ability to engage in professional relationships in the demanding online environment. The students’ sense of themselves as being more confident and articulate perhaps also underlines the value of the international experience this modest project provides and which drives us forward in our future collaborations.

Future steps

The upcoming ‘Murder@ Parrot Cove?’, to be presented in the spring of 2013, will be the second time students have been used as original producers of the materials. As stated above, students created the storyline and all materials for ‘Murder@ Golden Bay?’ and a second group maintained the materials but altered the storyline resulting in ‘Murder@ Jefferson Falls?’. Students at UWF who completed the Jefferson Falls project volunteered to produce Parrot Cove. This group of 12 students enrolled in a directed/independent study project during summer 2012. This group knew what they liked and did not like in their ‘Murder@ … ?’. experience. They were extremely eager to create their own storyline, identify the necessary evidence, provide the properly timed clues, take photos, and develop witnesses and suspects to be interrogated.

Initially, a mandatory meeting with the leading academic was scheduled with all participants to explain in depth the purpose, requirements, and challenges of the project as well as afford each student an opportunity to meet face to face with other members of his/her team. In addition to introductions, days and times of mandatory meetings were established to best accommodate participants’ schedules. Lastly, a brief discussion of possible scenarios ensued and students were asked record their top three scenarios so that they could establish a direction to proceed during the next meeting. It should be noted that students had approximately 10 weeks to complete their task. A general discussion board within the e-learning platform at UWF was created for questions and ideas to be presented by members of the team.

During the second meeting, team members presented their scenarios. It was important for the team to understand that one of the purposes was to create a scenario that was challenging but also reasonable, thought-provoking, and able to be solved. For the team, it was very important to create a scenario with a definite resolution because the Jefferson Falls project resulted in a crime for which not enough evidence existed to identify a ‘killer’. Although, and as explained by team leaders, a good deal of crimes involving death are ultimately ‘unsolved’, the consensus was to not proceed in that manner. By the meeting’s end, the team had settled on a scenario, which proved to be various elements of multiple students’ scenarios. Team leaders were pleased with this because detail and description were believed to be the biggest challenges from the onset.

Students were then asked to choose which specific duties they would like to be responsible for throughout the rest of the project. Students were given the choice of ‘Character Construction’, ‘Visual Presentation’, and ‘Muster Reports’. Naturally and ideally, the groups were to be broken down into four (4) members working closely to meet their objectives. Character construction included names, personality traits, demographics, and connection to each other and the storyline. This team was also responsible for creating interrogation questions relevant to each character. Visual Presentation included photographs of characters, evidence, scene photographs, mugshots, and anything else determined to be ‘visually relevant’ in the project. Muster Report team members drafted and finalised ‘musters’ to be released during and throughout the project. Musters are generated by the ‘police chief’ and released to teams of students engaged in solving the crime. Musters provide more calculating detail throughout the process of solving the crime. This team was also primarily responsible for generating official press releases to be used strategically throughout the project with musters in guiding teams toward a successful resolution.

From this point, students were allowed to set meeting times that met or exceeded what was deemed mandatory by team leaders. Separate discussion boards were created for each team to communicate without having to be face to face. The boards were viewable to other groups, which proved to be important, because teams could check on each other’s progress as well as borrow ideas that yielded the most successful results. Several other Discussion Boards were created to foster perpetual communication such as ‘Timeline’ so that storyline conflict issues could be discussed and resolved.

At the conclusion of a previously established deadline, teams came back together, presented their final products to the entire group, and collective finalisation took place. After about a month, with time away from the project, the students convened for one final meeting. They went through each document, photo, piece of evidence, storyline, and timeline, checking for errors or inconsistencies. They addressed these as they came up, made corrections, double-checked, and agreed that they had created an error-free experience for the students who would be navigating ‘Murder@ Parrot Cove?’ in the very near future.

Conclusion

Although wikis are now used instead of the initial use of email as a communication medium, this is still zero-cost to our students. The online environments are time consuming (some students get consumed by the project) and the preparation required is considerable for academics. Perhaps some busy academics avoid new technologies. They cannot be blamed – look at how email has come to dominate our lives. But perhaps we could break the habit of email (a form of communication that is not all that far removed from old-fashioned letters) and find more interactive ways of communicating.

Three key recommendations are offered from this paper:

1. The tools used are not really the issue because most students and academics want to keep things simple: so basic tools are needed that do not get in the way of the interaction.

2. Institutions of higher education need to develop methods, systems and support to enable international collaboration.

3. Curriculum change is necessary to focus on the relationships of collaboration between students and academics.

The recommendations made here are central to international collaborations between students and academics. Shared learning needs to be supported by a responsive curriculum and facilitated by institutional changes that value global collaboration. To maintain and develop a collaborative partnership, effort needs to be made by all parties to spend time in the other partner institutions, possibly in the form of sabbaticals, to develop further understanding. If collaboration is to grow through, for example, the development of new courses that fit the needs of both institutions and students, the relationships of trust already established between academics and students has to be empowered by institutional commitment. Higher education is in a state of transition globally. Twenty years from now the definition and delivery of higher education will look very different from what it is today. Although it is difficult to gaze into the crystal ball to see the ‘university of the future’, our vision is of globally networked university systems, which are designed to meet the needs of changing demands of students and the pedagogy with which they engage.

Collaborative, international teaching is still in its early days within universities despite cottage industries such as our initiative having a history of nearly ten years. The creation of methods, systems and tools to enable international collaboration will require the combined efforts of educators, publishers, technologists and information specialists. If universities are to get serious about international collaborations, they need to consider curriculum change and new programmes of study that facilitate virtual forms of human interaction. Our ‘Murder@ … ?’ initiative is just one small example of how virtual spaces can be constructed, cheaply and easily, to enable the collaboration of people who have not, and may not ever meet each other. This goes far beyond technical tools and challenges. There is a need for universities to engage in more systematic support of global identities. Our students often comment on the enhanced sense of global citizenship they gain from their participation in the project. So what if it is forged in front of their laptops at Starbucks? It sure beats the alternative and is maybe a start towards a larger sense of global community.