Washington, DC — Inexpensive Internet link for education opens lines for many uses

A partnership between East Carolina State University (ECU) in Greenville, North Carolina, and the University of The Gambia in Banjul is bringing American and Gambian students together and encouraging them "to look at things in a completely different way," says Dr. Elmer Poe, a specialist in distance educational learning (known as D.E.).

Dr. Poe, who oversees the project along with cultural psychologist Dr. Rosina Chia, assistant vice chancellor for global academic initiatives, came to Washington recently to discuss the newly inaugurated effort with the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs and with Margaret Tutwiler, the under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.

The project, which was initiated with State Department support in the summer of 2003, brings the students in Greenville and Banjul together several times a week in a virtual classroom where they see and speak to each other in real time through two-way video and computer link-ups, using inexpensive and low-tech connections. The students are also partnered so they can conduct required daily e-mail chats.

"We see this technology for our own students as a way for those who aren't going to get to The Gambia or to China or to any of the other cultures, to really interact with people from these cultures," said Poe, who is the associate provost for distance education and academic information technology at ECU.

"Every day when our students leave the classroom, they have been challenged; and yesterday everybody was challenged because of the cultural issues they were discussing. And the same is true for the Gambian students!"

The cultural issues being discussed the previous day, he explained, concerned marriage partners, sexual mores, and other very sensitive issues of the students' choice, which might be deemed "inappropriate in normal class sessions in some places," but this setting allowed more personal interaction. This is real cross-cultural education without the charts, graphs and pictures that usually accompany classes and discussions on the differences between societies, he said.

While ECU and the University of the Gambia (UTG) seem like odd partners, they actually fit together surprisingly well.

East Carolina University serves eastern rural North Carolina, "the largest geographical area [in the state] with the smallest number of people," Poe said, enrolling 21,000 students. Because of its distance from urban centers and the demographics of the student body, it has been forced to develop "alternate delivery methods," and distance education and the Internet filled the bill, he said, with particular interests in the critical areas of health care, teacher education, technology and economic development.

These proved a good match to the concerns of the Gambian university, which was established only three years ago as the sole university in The Gambia, and "is really growing and doing well," said Poe.

Although UTG doesn't have a central campus yet and was formed from small schools that were "pulled together, it does enroll about 3,000 students. It set up a single lab with 12 computers," Poe said, but they share a single 64K line with another 12 computers on campus. A key issue to the project was getting the university administration and an outside provider to guarantee a higher level of connectivity specifically for the program. Similarly, they had to find appropriate technology at the low end of the digital video scale that would make the project affordable and practical for both sides. In fact, Dr. Poe donated his own laptop to UTG and brought over a simple Polycom video camera for the program.

Actually, the pilot project, which began in January, is a four-sided program, according to Chia and Poe, because they have included small classes of 10 students from a Chinese and a Swiss university as well. So the classes have a chance to interact with each of the counterpart classes to discuss their societal differences.

Dr. Chia, a cross-cultural psychologist, explained the class process: "Throughout the semester we partner first with one culture, then with another, then with the third. So while ECU is partnering with The Gambia, China is partnering with Switzerland.

"The way we do it: each session five students have individual chats with the other five students. The remaining five students will sit in a small group with five Gambian students and they talk.

"We gave them the topics for each of the four discussion sessions. The first one talks about family; and ... the faculty member throws out two specific questions within the family; how the cultural traditions work, the meaning of life, etc.

"We also wanted to make sure the students are linked with a partner. When we selected the students we made it very clear to them, 'You can't drop a class in the middle of a semester or if you didn't wake up you don't come, because there are other people there waiting for you.'

"We randomly partnered them so number one in ECU is a number one in Gambia; there's a number one in Switzerland; there's a number one in China. And they're given bios so they know a bit about each other and start e-mailing and chatting with them even before the formal classes begin.

"At the end of each culture exchange, the two student partners will write a joint paper on some topic within the four [subjects] we gave them: family, work, society, traditions, which are graded by their respective teachers. Each student will also be asked to write a paper on some aspect of the course.

So far, she said, it has been very rewarding and the students have really developed close personal relationships through the Internet dialogues. "We can hardly get them to stop talking to each other!"

The ECU professors see the project as having potential in a wide range of courses, especially in the business and technology areas. "As far as we know, nothing like this that has ever been done. Lectures, yes. "But not this interactive model with two international classes, one faculty on each side of equal weight. That's not been done."

While they have taught the students some of the chatting basics for the class, Chia sees the process as going much farther and deeper through the graduates. "We anticipate when these students graduate, they tell their boss, 'Hey, you don't have to fly to Washington -- or to Gambia. You can talk about peanuts when you're here and they are there,'" she said.

And for a very small investment and the lowest common denominator in terms of technology! Poe added, describing how his interactive video-conferencing uses the regular Internet, so that any improvement that's made "isn't made for the project alone but spills out onto all of the Internet base."

[Editor's note: According to Dr. Poe, the video-conferencing unit they use is the ViaVideo, an H.323-compatible unit made by Polycom that connects to a Personal Computer (PC). It uses the PC's display and Internet connection for the video-conferencing. A second advantage is that the PC can be used for e-mail, web work and all other regular Internet activities when the class is not in session. Other companies make H.323-compatible videoconferencing devices, but ECU has found the ViaVideo cheap and reliable.]

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)