CONWAY — When students in two of Jay McDaniel’s Hendrix College classes gather this fall, they will be joined at times by students in northeast China.
The Chinese students won’t be traveling to the United States. Rather, the classes at Hendrix and at three universities in China will be connected through video conferencing for special lectures by McDaniel and by a Chinese professor.
Students in both countries will get to ask questions of both professors and join in international conversations with one another.
McDaniel, a professor of religious studies, already has some experience with what he called “blended learning” - the concept of combining digital technology and classroom learning.
In February, McDaniel and a professor at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., participated in a similar project. Like Hendrix, Rollins is a private liberal-arts college.
McDaniel lectured to students at both colleges on popular music in America as it pertains to religion. The Rollins professor spoke on music in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Each teacher participated in the project for about a week.
The shared experience gave students in both places the benefit of expertise their own teacher could not provide.
“I wouldn’t have known the first thing about what he [the Rollins teacher] could have lectured on,” McDaniel said. “That’s why we needed him. He wouldn’t have been able to do what I did either.”
Chinese students participating in the classes this fall are English-language speakers. The international discussions also will give them an opportunity to practice their English skills, McDaniel noted.
McDaniel’s lectures will focus on a Chinese short story translated into English, “Renting a Son for New Year” by Zong Lihua; Confucianism; and civil-rights activist W.E.B. DuBois.
The Chinese professor will discuss higher-education and environmental issues.
McDaniel believes the benefits of such programs are twofold.
“Your students can benefit from people who have expertise that’s not offered on your campus,” he said. “A second [benefit] is that it facilitates cross-cultural dialogue. ... It widens your horizons.”
A common thread between the Chinese and American philosophy studies is “process philosophy,” a topic influenced by Alfred North Whitehead and studied in China and the United States.
Whitehead’s philosophy is “studied these days as something that can offer a promising future” and that “has implications for education and environment,” McDaniel said.
The Chinese and the Americans “can even kind of dream together,” he said. “It provides a subject of conversation between us.”
Students already, of course, can take online courses from various universities.
Those courses allow students to “check in and check out” when they desire, said David Hinson, Hendrix College’s chief information officer and executive vice president. But blended learning, he said, “is much more in-person, live at the moment.”
It also allows “a high level of interactivity,” he said.
Hinson hopes Hendrix and other colleges expand their use of the technology, which includes high-end videoconferencing so that the camera focuses on the person speaking and there’s eye contact.
“It’s much more conversational” than less-sophisticated video systems, he said.
The cost of such equipment varies. Most typically, though, it would cost about $20,000 to equip a room properly, Hinson said.
Bob Entzminger, Hendrix provost and executive vice president, referred to the technology as “telepresencing.”
“It means the ... technology essentially becomes invisible,” Entzminger said. “It really does re-create the feel of an entirely self-contained classroom experience.”
Some members of the Associated Colleges of the South already have begun working toward more blended-learning experiences among the consortium’s 16 member schools. Hendrix and Rollins are among the members, as is Rhodes College in Memphis.
Entzminger said Rollins, for example, also has worked with Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.
Professors from cooperating colleges will not mirror one another’s teaching. Rather, “they’d be complementary,” Entzminger said.
Another advantage of the technology as it becomes more widespread, the provost said, is that students studying abroad could use it to take courses they might need for graduation back home.
That way, they could “stay on track for graduation,” even though they were studying in another country, he said.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 05/29/2012