Global learning is a process that involves people collaborating to analyze and address complex problems that transcend borders (Landorf & Doscher, 2015). Through global learning, students gain three essential outcomes: global awareness, global perspective, and global engagement. You can use these principles and resources to facilitate global learning in your online courses. You may also use them with international partners through Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL)
Global Perspective
Establish a social presence
Global learning develops a global perspective, the ability to understand and connect multiple perspectives on the world. This begins with students feeling comfortable sharing their own points of view as members of the online community, a phenomenon known as social presence. The first step toward developing a global perspective is helping students get to know the unique and common knowledge, experiences, skills, and perspectives present in the online community.
- Icebreaker Activity Ideas
- Mapping Your Cultural Orientation Activity
- Intercultural Storytelling Prompts (Video)
- Intercultural Storytelling Prompts (eBook)
- Creative Ways to Establish Social Presence Online
Global Awareness
Structure interdependence
Global learning should develop global awareness, knowledge of the world’s complexity and interrelatedness. The problems and questions students grapple within a Global Learning course demand collaboration because they are too complex for any single person, group, discipline, or approach to solve alone. Global Learning courses must engage students in collaboration to prepare them for success in their personal, professional, and civic lives.
- Designing Instructions for Collaboration, an excerpt from Learning to Collaborate, Collaborating to Learn (Salmons, 2019)
- Designing Teams and Assigning Roles
- Collaborative Task Ideas
- Online Tools That Support Each Level of Bloom’s Taxonomy
- Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Nearly Everything You Can Do Online
- 20 Collaborative Learning Tips for Teachers
- Rubric for a Group Project
Global Engagement
Promote connection making
Global engagement is the willingness to work with others to solve complex problems. Global learning promotes global engagement when students are invited to connect ideas and perspectives they previously thought conflicting or completely unrelated. New knowledge is formed when students take parts of different ideas and put them together to create new ideas. These resources will help you promote connection-making online.
- Three Ways to Help Students Link Course Content to the World Around Them
- Designing Collaborative Dialogue
- The Ultimate Guide to Effective Remote Collaboration, from Miro, a collaborative mind mapping and whiteboard tool
- Create an Unhangout
- Ways Ideas Connect
- Student Reflection Ideas
- Remote Community Engagement Activities,by Tessa Hicks Peterson, Pitzer College
Do you have suggestions for more great online global learning resources? Send them to goglobal@fiu.edu.