An International Partnership in the Development of Distance Education Programs

Project Director: Tom Duffy

We are entering our final year of this project funded by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It is a partnership with Azerbaijan State Economic University (ASEU) and the Azerbaijan Research and Education National Association (AzRENA). The goal of the project is to support the Azeris in developing an E-Learning Center (ELC) that will support all their universities in offering distance education (DE). The focus of the project is in developing internal capabilities in instructional design, instructional consulting, and online educational platforms. We are not focused on providing DE ourselves nor on building the technology infrastructure. There are already numerous infrastructure projects so our effort is in assuring the use of the infrastructure for education.

Azerbaijan is a developing country of 8 million people in Central Asia, bordering the Caspian Sea, Iran, Georgia, Russia, and Armenia. The first two private universities in the former Soviet Union are located and thriving in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. In this project, we are training four staff to manage the ELC and work with Universities. Their learning is project-centered in that they are designing courses on distance education that can be offered to faculty and they are designing workshops to offer at universities. This past year, the team offered their first workshop to 22 faculty representing 14 universities in Baku and they completed the development of two distance education courses for faculty. We, as a team, have also made arrangements with a major local service provider to host the open source version of Oncourse and convert it to the Azeri language.

The Azeri team comes to Bloomington for seven weeks each summer and the IU team visits Baku for up to a month for face-to-face workshops and planning. This summer the team presented the work at the Wisconsin Distance Education meeting. In the space of two years the Azeri team is coming to be recognized as the experts on distance education, even having representatives of other, neighboring countries come to them for advice. Our plans for next year include completing work on this project and focusing on writing papers about the cross-cultural experiences encountered in the project. In particular, we wish to document interesting implications of the cultural unfamiliarity with collaborative work and the design of instruction that attends to the learners' needs.