Communication challenges in international education

摘要

Distance and collaborative education has many potential benefits, most notably is the ability to overcome the temporal and spatial restrictions of traditional educational settings, but changes in general communication processes between educators and students, educators themselves and students themselves are also predominant. With both business and personal life becoming more collaborative and less geo-centric (just consider examples of social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, or examples of collaborative economy like Uber or Airbnb), the authors' institution, with its international campuses in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, is setting a new level of distance and collaborative education that enables students form different cultures and time zones to work together on real projects in a controlled, academic setting, but in a manner that mirrors business and industry projects to a very significant degree. Three instructors and more than 50 students are working jointly on the same projects and relying greatly on effective communication. In this work, the authors address and describe their experiences and challenges in communication and collaborative education from both their perspective and the students' perspective. The main intention is to make the educational process more efficient and to introduce more interaction between the students and their teachers, who act more as project advisors.