SCILNet and Institue for International Studies partner with South Africa

In Pretoria, South Africa, one university-based virtual community is so strong it has held a birthday party, put on a carnival, played reality games for prize vacations and even staged an Internet soccer game. Enthusiastic participants were the subjects of research at the University of Pretoria, where professors are studying the impact of virtual and distance communication on learning.

Now faculty from the South African project are joining forces with the newly created Stanford University International Outreach Program (SUIOP) to collaborate and increase the reach and power of their research. The project, funded by a seed grant from the Whitehead Foundation, is a joint effort of SCIL's international program, SCILNet, and the Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS), and falls within Stanford's recently announced Stanford International Initiative. After the current planning phase, the international team will seek additional funding for implementing an initial pilot study.

"We are excited at the prospect of working with SCIL and the University of Pretoria to build upon what SIIS has done in Russia in the realm of distance education," says Coit Blacker, director of the Stanford Institute for International Studies.   "This type of collaboration lies at the heart of the International Initiative - creating interdisciplinary relationships to promote innovative research and academic programs, not only within the Stanford community, but internationally."

In a fall visit to campus, a team of educators from the University of Pretoria's School of Education met with SCILNet and SIIS to begin mapping out a joint project that will explore how distance learning in different cultural contexts can be both compelling and effective.

SIIS's current distance learning program offers courses in international security to ten Russian universities. The South Africa project aims to deliver the same Stanford course content to a consortium of three diverse universities in the northern region of South Africa.

Johannes Cronje, a professor of information science at the University of Pretoria, was part of the contingent that visited Stanford.

"The basic research question is what are the dynamics of e-learning," he explained. "In our country we are dealing with many issues, but our students still want to be able to study by distance learning because it is 24/7 (available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.)"

"Securing stable technology from the beginning is a very big factor for us, but once we accomplish that, we are interested in getting learners to go from a push to a pull, getting the students to have the attitude that they can find any information they want. We are going to be looking at what is information seeking behavior, and what is information learning behavior."

"What works in one country doesn't always work in another.   Therefore to have the opportunity to adapt an existing distance-learning model for use in a different educational and technological culture is quite an opportunity.   In this case, studying how text messaging can be used in a classroom to affect students' learning is quite interesting, particularly since text-messaging is not as prevalent in the US as it seems to be in South Africa."   Katherine Kuhns, Managing Director, Initiative on Distance Learning

For more information on SIIS's distance-learning program in Russia, visit: http://idl.stanford.edu/

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