Scalable synchronous cohort-based international education

Abstract

In the highly competitive market for international graduate students, universities have aimed to reach students via asynchronous online programs or by establishing branch campuses. To address the quality concerns and costs of these approaches, recent work has demonstrated a novel instructional technology that enables synchronous, interactive instruction to international students. In this work, we report on our efforts to increase the scalability of this approach. Specifically, we present our new approach of teaching synchronously to multiple classrooms in parallel and to multiple students who use their own devices. This paper presents the instructional environment from the instructor and student perspectives and discusses the interactions that are possible within an instructional cohort (i.e., the group of students taught by one instructor across all classrooms or devices). We discuss how this novel approach can scale to very large numbers of students, only limited by the number of interactions that are possible per student. The enrollment data show that the scalability of these approaches has caused a shift of all instruction in our program to these new instructional modes.