J. Michael Adams was the keynote speaker at the Third International Internet Education Conference, held in Cairo, Egypt, on October 11–13, 2004.

Introduction

Globalization has undeniably altered our world. Through revolutionary technological developments, we are literally closer to each other than ever before. We can move physically across borders in just minutes and hours, and we can connect to each other in cyberspace in nanoseconds. Such closeness brings tremendous rewards, but it also has brings serious challenges. Our networks of connections can quickly transmit great ideas and benefits but they also can rapidly spread controversy, conflict, disease and environmental ruin.

Our destinies are connected, but unfortunately our knowledge of each other has not kept pace with our abilities to connect. Too often at too many universities we remain mired in old methods working within conventional structures that have not adapted to the global realities. Working within our nation-states, we often remain isolated from our brothers and sisters outside our borders. Adaptation does not come easy to the academy. H.G. Wells once noted, “The universities go out to meet the tremendous challenges of our social and political life, like men who go out in armour with bows and arrows to meet a bombing aeroplane.” We must update the arsenal.

Businesses have long recognized the importance of thinking and acting globally. So have many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). And so must we in higher education. The future depends on us. The future depends on the next generation being able to work across cultures and nations to forge global solutions. The future depends on global citizens who possess the understanding of our common desires and the knowledge of local concerns. It is thus our responsibility to educate a generation of global citizens who will change the world.

Our students must be able to flourish in a world marked by diversity, nearly universal digital information access, global interrelationships and rapid change. We need graduates who are comfortable in foreign environments, familiar with different cultures and skilled in drawing connections between the local and the global.

There are many ways to educate global citizens. Certainly, studying abroad and learning another language are valuable elements of a global education. And incorporating global issues and views throughout the curriculum is vital. But not everyone can travel, or live and learn in a local environment rich with diversity and multicultural perspectives. One powerful emerging tool is online learning through the Internet.

Introducing Fairleigh Dickinson University

Founded more than 60 years ago by a true educational pioneer, Fairleigh Dickinson University has gained an international reputation for innovation and adaptation. Long before other educators looked beyond their country’s borders, Dr. Peter Sammartino emphasized cultural and global awareness. He welcomed world leaders and foreign students to campus and established partnerships and close relationships throughout the world.

Led by Sammartino, Fairleigh Dickinson quickly grew from a small, two-year college into the largest private university in New Jersey, with more than 10,000 students from around the world. And in 1965, we became the first American university to own a campus in England, when we opened Wroxton College. In addition, other international programs were established and strong ties were forged with international bodies like the United Nations.

In 2000, we renewed and formalized this long-standing emphasis on global themes through the adoption of a new mission: to prepare students for world citizenship through global education.

A global education certainly provides knowledge and understanding of culture, language, geography and global perspectives. But even more importantly, a global education enables students to understand their roles in a global community and how their actions can affect citizens throughout the globe.

Global education is a process that should be tailored to an institution’s particular resources and strengths. For example, at FDU we are fortunate to be in close proximity to the United Nations headquarters. We have developed special friendships with ambassadors and other officials, and earned accreditation as an NGO associated with the Department of Public Information at the United Nations. The result is a number of globally enlightening opportunities for our students, including a special lecture series, privileged access to U.N. briefings and facilities, videoconferences broadcast from the United Nations to our University and others, and U.N. internships.

We are fulfilling our mission in numerous other ways. World-class faculty have developed new programs and have infused global lessons throughout the curriculum. New, substantive partnerships have been formed with international institutions in places like Spain, Belize, China, Turkey, Cyprus, Monaco and the Dominican Republic. These agreements are drawing more international students to FDU, while creating opportunities for student and faculty exchanges as well as joint research projects. And then there’s our groundbreaking online-learning programs.

Wiring Into the World

Increasingly the limits of geography and borders are being overcome by perhaps the most revolutionary learning tool in history: the Internet. As technology has helped integrate economies and communities, it also can connect students to new worlds. Access via the Internet a satellite view of our continents at night and determine what the concentration of lights tells us about the distribution of populations and resources. Take a virtual tour of St. Petersburg and “walk” the halls of the Hermitage. Use the World Wide Web to monitor the weekly United Nations’ update on world issues, check out a Webcast of live and archived meetings and events at the United Nations or download data from the World Health Organization on the spread of infectious diseases like AIDS or SARS. Or, log onto the online editions of international newspapers and learn how important issues are covered differently around the globe. The examples are endless.

The Internet has widely democratized knowledge, providing a world of information about different peoples and cultures. But it also can link people together. Classrooms can easily interact with students in other countries. Look at the work, for example, of iEARN (International Education and Resource Network), a non-profit organization including more than 20,000 schools from over 100 countries. iEARN’s goal is “to use the Internet and other new technologies to engage in collaborative educational projects that both enhance learning and make a difference in the world” (www.iearn.org). The group currently offers more than 120 teacher-created projects that are rooted in real world problems, are international in scope and are targeted to students ages 5 though 19.

Once a project is selected, teachers enter online forum spaces to meet one another and get involved with classrooms around the world working on the same project. Students focus on all sorts of areas from the environment to social and cultural issues. Each project features some concrete task, ranging from a letter-writing campaign, a play, a publication or producing a Web site. Teachers and students in this global network are truly learning how to become global citizens and are gaining a dynamic global education.

Another great example of the use of the Internet in education is the ICONS (International Communication and Negotiation Simulation) program at the University of Maryland College Park, which enables U.S. students to interact with students in other countries using Web-based software. Students explore a range of global issues, assume the roles of decision-makers from other countries and enter into online negotiations with groups of students representing other countries (www.icons.umd.edu). Other universities likewise are using technology to facilitate dialogues between students and teachers from different countries. Such dialogue is the essential first step in achieving understanding.

The FDU Model

Nearly everybody understands the importance of the Internet as a communication and research tool. We can access information instantly and find data that, just a few years ago, would have been inaccessible or a great challenge to locate. But, as more and more people are starting to learn, the Internet can greatly facilitate cross-cultural collaborations.

Until recently, most universities used online learning to reach out to the world and to find new populations of students. Fairleigh Dickinson University has approached this from a completely different mindset. We realized we must base our online program on educational needs, rather than enrollment or financial concerns. And, most importantly, we recognized that if we could use the Internet to reach out to the world, the corollary is also true: we can use the Internet to bring the world to campus.

At Fairleigh Dickinson, the power of the Internet and online learning is viewed as an integral part of the learning process. In a groundbreaking program, FDU has become the first university to require that all undergraduate students take one online course per year (one for every 32 credits).

The program, begun in 2001, is driven by two fundamental goals:

1.   to bring students global perspectives by using scholars and practitioners located throughout the world; and

2.   to develop global citizens who can use the Internet as a lifelong learning, information, communications and collaboration tool.

Global Virtual Faculty

The cornerstone of our University-wide online-learning requirement is the Global Virtual Facultyä program. The Global Virtual Facultyä (GVF) are a cadre of first-rate scholars, professionals and experts from around the world. Working in partnership with on-site faculty, these individuals bring a global dimension to the issues being studied. For example, GVF participate in threaded discussions on course topics, present relevant narrative material or case studies, share observations on a presented paper and direct students to useful Web resources.

Imagine a philosophy student examining how basic philosophical concepts like rationalism and empiricism are applied to forensic investigations with a former head homicide investigator from Scotland Yard. Or a freshman in an e-mail exchange discussing the impact of globalization on Southeast Asia with an economics professor from Malaysia. Or a Nobel Prize-winning literature course taught by an American instructor with online contributions by an Arabic language and literature instructor from Egypt. Such interactions happen daily at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Each course that engages a GVF is a collaborative teaching effort. The primary instructor is a campus-based faculty member who is responsible for the syllabus, primary instruction and reading materials, assignments and evaluation. All communication and participation is online, with the GVF member remaining in his or her homeenvironment throughout.

Philosophy professor and Core Curriculum director James Kuehl observed, “The Global Virtual Facultyä have an enthusiasm for global issues that is entirely infectious. These good colleagues from far away places put the human face on the issues that matter to our species.” FDU’s Global Virtual Facultyä program in 2003 was one of 11 university efforts nationally awarded special recognition from the American Council on Education and AT&T for its use of technology as a tool for internationalizing the curriculum.

The Global Challenge Sets the Foundation

Our dilemma in developing the new online initiative was how to fit this new requirement into the curriculum without producing any new demands on student credit hours or limiting their options to choose general education electives. Our solution was to link the requirement in the freshman and sophomore years to existing required courses and, in the third and fourth years, to a more organic development of courses that individual faculty members want to teach online. Thus no new credit-requirements were added, just the method of delivery and the pedagogical design.

The program begins with the heralded freshman online Core course The Global Challenge. This interdisciplinary course fulfills a pre-existing requirement as the first in a series of four University-wide Core courses. The Global Challenge examines topics critical to our interdependent and interconnected world, such as global conflict, the environment and population and health. As students investigate challenges to humankind, such as those raised by environmental degradation, modern warfare and deadly infectious diseases, they interact with experts from around the globe as well as classmates and faculty members. Through access to sources on the Internet, students learn how to evaluate and integrate information. Special attention is given to the implications of the scientific method as compared with cultural, aesthetic and ethical approaches to understanding the world around us.

The Instructional Technology Council (ITC) recently recognized The Global Challenge with the ITC Award for Outstanding Online Course, one of just two institutionally created online courses honored by the ITC. The awards criteria included excellence in the overall plan of instructional design throughout the course presentation, content, activities, evaluation and course management.

In the second year, the online learning requirement is linked to the specific offerings of each college. Students choose one online learning course within their respective college. Each college designed between one and three online courses, all of which fulfill existing requirements. Among the courses for sophomores are Macroeconomics; Business in a Global Society; Nobel Literature; Environmental Biology; Film and Society; Career Women in Literature and Film, and The Life of the Mind.

The junior and senior-year requirements include a broad range of disciplinary requirements and electives that faculty members either already teach face-to-face or new courses that they want to develop.

The result today is that students have access to hundreds of online offerings, which include both blended and fully online courses. The growth has been impressive.

 Online learning is now thoroughly integrated into the entire FDU curriculum.

(See www.globaleducation.edu for more information about Fairleigh Dickinson University’s online-learning requirement, Global Virtual Facultyä and other global education initiatives.)

The Classroom vs. Online Learning Debate

While debates have raged about the merits of online learning versus the traditional classroom environment, they are two different ways of learning.

We are often asked, “Is FDU saying online learning is better than the traditional classroom?” Our response is “that is the wrong question.” A great teacher in a classroom is magical. A bad teacher in a classroom is a tragedy. You can be taught well in the classroom and you can be taught poorly in the classroom. The same applies to the Internet.

Whether or not a course is effective depends upon questions of purpose, population, intent, content and the commitment of the teacher. The learning environment is not defined by walls or student desks. Online delivery is simply an alternative channel. An effective teacher uses available and appropriate tools to enhance student learning.

From the beginning, we approached online learning with a serious commitment to evaluate and apply what we learned to improve the overall learning environment. Systematic student assessments in the first year Global Challenge course, as well as many other online-learning courses, have been conducted each semester.

Findings suggest that student experiences have been gradually and increasingly positive over the past three years. Even though the online format is new to most of them and demands a higher level of responsibility and independent work, many students’ sense of ease with (and ratings of) these courses is growing.

The majority of students say they are learning more, they work harder and they are satisfied with their online courses. And our faculty are finding that they are in many instances more connected with their students through this form of learning. They see students who normally might be reticent to speak out in person develop faster and become more engaged in inquiry and “discussion.”

We believe that student and faculty experiences of online learning at FDU will continue to evolve positively as they understand in greater depth what it means to be successful in this important medium.

Another demonstration of the effectiveness and depth of this still young online-learning initiative is the growth and reach of the Global Virtual Facultyä program. The program, as of spring 2004, included 46 scholars and practitioners from 23 countries. These GVF last year worked with approximately 900 students, or 25 percent of FDU’s regular undergraduate student body in online courses. GVF teaching experiences, as well as those of their FDU faculty partners, are also systematically assessed at the end of each semester. These findings show a consistently high level of satisfaction with the program on the part of both GVF and their faculty partners, and a general perception of strong student learning outcomes.

By every measure, online learning can be just as effective as any other form of learning. The key, though, just as in the classroom, is for teachers to engage their students in a meaningful manner.

One thing not debatable is that the Internet is here to stay, and we have to prepare people to use it well. The Internet can stimulate the most striking innovations in teaching and learning in recent history. Not only can it provide the benefits of a lifetime of learning, it also can bring people and cultures closer together.

One caveat regarding the Internet and technology: We must remain cognizant of the fact that virtual online connections are invaluable, but they are a supplement to, not a replacement for, the real person-to-person communications and connections that make life and learning so wonderfully rich.

The Reality of Cost

There is a myth that online instruction is less expensive than traditional classroom delivery. Many institutions and early users have been motivated to use the Internet to deliver an inexpensive education and to gain new income. But we have learned that the reality is far different from such expectations. If done correctly and with a high level of interaction, instructor-led online learning is usually more expensive than traditional classroom teaching, and its income potential is limited to niche educational initiatives and markets.

While Fairleigh Dickinson University received significant national and international media attention for its online initiative, it is interesting that the media have been captivated by the novelty of the concept, while other higher education institutions have been more intrigued by the fact that the requirement is motivated by educational goals rather than enrollment or financial considerations. Because so many institutions approached online learning as a profitable venture, our effort to emphasize educational quality first and foremost stood out as a novel and valuable approach.

We began this program not to achieve higher student revenue in the short run, but to enhance the educational value of our curriculum and to prepare students to develop lifelong learning skills. And while we anticipated significant long-term benefits, the immediate financial challenges were daunting. In fact, the full five-year implementation will cost approximately $12 million (U.S.), within the University’s approximate $130 million (U.S.) operating budget.

The high cost of this endeavor raises the issue of return on investment. We certainly aim to serve as many students as possible, and this obviously generates institutional revenues. But in education, investment returns are measured by more than dollars and cents. Our ultimate returns are measured by the enhancement of our institutional reputation, the fulfillment of our global mission, the satisfaction of our students and the development of global citizens. The rewards for our students and for our University are well worth the expense.

We also should note that many of the costs for this program were not directly related to online learning but rather reflect needed information technology infrastructure investments that would have been undertaken eventually, but at a slower pace. And the start-up costs were supported by a $3.9 million (U.S.) grant from the state of New Jersey, anda grant by the AT&T Foundation. Support is available if we can inspire others through our innovation and dedication.

Evolution of Online Curriculum/Learning

Once an institution makes the commitment to this new mode of learning and delivery, many permutations and combinations are possible. In 2003, Fairleigh Dickinson had established four key online assets:

• Strong, effective digital infrastructure foundation
• Faculty well-versed in the technology
• Demonstrated success in effective online curriculum development
• National and international recognition

The decision was made to pursue particularly focused opportunities. The strategy was to link our online assets with specific areas of academic strength within the University. For example, we linked our traditional emphasis on security and law enforcement programs with our capabilities in online learning to meet new demands in the field.

Fairleigh Dickinson has long had a strong relationship with regional law enforcement agencies. Our Master of Administrative Science graduate program has been delivered to thousands of police, fire and state employees. We also have a nationally-acclaimed criminal justice program. And, after 9/11, we provided space to the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey to replace its security training facility. More than 500 new officers were trained on campus to replace those who died in the tragedy and to increase police presence at metropolitan airports, container ports and railroad stations.

To complement these strengths, partnering with the United States National Guard, we requested Congressional funding to support creation of three new online programs:

• Global Security and Terrorism Studies
• Emergency Management Administration
• Computer Security and Forensics Administration

To date, the U.S. Congress, through the Department of Defense appropriations, has provided three $500,000 (U.S.) grants in support of those programs. The first two programs are complete in delivery mode. They are currently being promoted to the over 400,000 members of the U.S. National Guard.

In addition, because of the quality of these programs, FDU has become the primary online educational provider for Booz-Allen International, and is now a partner with the World Trade Center University.

In addition to the online initiative and the certificate programs mentioned, FDU offers a diverse range of fully online degree and certificate programs, including:

• Master of Administrative Science
• Master of Electrical Engineering
• Bachelor of Arts in Individualized Studies
• Graduate Certificate in Management Information Systems

These programs have reached students throughout New Jersey and the country. We have progressed rapidly in a short time, and we are determined to be a national leader in global education and online learning. We are determined to continue emphasizing online learning to engage our students with international voices, to further introduce them to fascinating new worlds and information via the Web, and to use this exciting medium to build on our strengths and provide more programs to our friends throughout the world.

It is important to emphasize, however, that Fairleigh Dickinson University does not see itself as moving to an exclusive e-learning environment. It simply sees online learning as a natural evolution of the commitment to currency, excellence and enhancing the learning experience for students.

A Choice for the Future

Global education and online learning are no longer merely provocative ideas that a few niche institutions need to consider. Today, virtually all colleges and universities must reflect on their implementation in some form. The influence on the curriculum will take many shapes as faculty and incoming students increasingly grow facile with this tool and as our recognition of our permeable boundaries grows.

With the learning capability of the Internet, students can reach out beyond normal boundaries, explore new worlds and learn how to play leading roles on a global stage. The Internet can bring us closer and introduce us to new ideas and people we never would have met otherwise.

Certainly, profound lessons can be conveyed without technology and we must seek to instill global lessons whenever and wherever possible. But to ignore the potential of the Internet and online learning to expand our horizons would be a blatant act of betrayal to our students and to the next generation. To be a global citizen today, one must seize the possibilities of digital technologies and online learning.

While such an emphasis on online learning and global studies affords our students multiple benefits, it also should unite educators from all disciplines. Whether you believe education should stress the liberal arts or professional studies, there exists a common need to more heavily incorporate global views, perspectives and lessons. The ability and knowledge to make global connections is fundamental for personal enlightenment, professional success in the global economy and, ultimately, for the very preservation of our planet.

Understanding the perspectives of others and understanding problems through the eyes of others helps reduce fears and misunderstandings that breed contempt, conflict and terror. Learning to work together across geographic and cultural borders will help counter international crises and insidious forces that threaten humanity. For this purpose, online learning is simply too powerful a vehicle to ignore. Its promise must be fulfilled.

Whether we can overcome global challenges will depend upon how we as educators use tools like online learning and how we school the next generation of global citizens. There simply is too much at stake in a globalized era to fail. The only hope for peace and justice in our world is education. Tanks and bombs don’t work — it is only by developing true understanding and cultivating genuine respect for each other that we will build the foundation for true global transformation. Online learning can be one of the fundamental building blocks toward that goal.

H.G. Wells once wrote, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” The choice is ours.