SUNY Broome Faculty Members are among 66 Global Guests in Live Online Classes Around the World
SUNY Broome faculty members Katherine Bacon (Theater), Lynda Carroll (Anthropology), Pej Reitz (Music) and Sara Rose (Math) are joining this semester with 62 other faculty members from around the world in SUNY COIL’s first-ever Global Guests Program. COIL is Collaborative Online International Learning.
Kathleen McKenna, our COIL Coordinator, and Stephanie Malmberg, our Assistant Dean, Distance Learning and Professional Development, worked together with Christina Lee and Amy Burtner of Monroe Community College, Fabiola Riobe of Rockland Community College, and Hope Windle, of SUNY COIL, to design and implement the program, which is based upon SUNY Broome’s successful Teaching Squares program.
The Teaching Squares and Global Guests programs are interdisciplinary. Global Guests will visit live online classes in many different time zones and in several languages. They will open their classrooms to peers and later reflect together on what good teaching is, while learning from, and brainstorming with, one another.
The planning group decided to capitalize on the opportunity, created by the pandemic’s expansion of online teaching, to invite colleagues to visit classes around the world. They had hoped that 40 faculty members might be interested, but instead, they were thrilled that 66 dedicated and creative faculty members from 10 different countries wanted to participate.
Between March 15 and May 17, Global Guests will visit their partners’ live online classes (and a few asynchronous online classes as well). Faculty members are working in groups of 2-4. As they visit one another’s classes, their goal is to savor and celebrate good teaching, and perhaps to pick up a few ideas they might use in their own classes. They might also envision opportunities for future collaborations. They will likely feel reenergized by their interactions with dedicated teachers from around the world.
The group met as a whole for a lively welcome and orientation on March 15. Some faculty members expressed interest in visiting more than 2-3 classes, and in sharing with their colleagues on their own campuses what they learn from the program. Participants will share in their small groups, on padlet (see below), in a GoogleDoc, and live online at the final Celebration of Teaching and Learning on May 17.
