Multinational Project-Based Education: An Alliance for Integration of Research, Education, and Service

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The focus of this project is on the development of multinational student/faculty project-based approaches to integrating research and education. Most major practical problems, such as environment, public health and the access to technology, are inherently interdisciplinary and are shared across national boundaries. Internationally, we also face the challenge of transforming higher education itself to become more accessible and more responsive to the needs of our communities. Faculty at the University of Washington have been working on models for coupling collaborative multinational research addressing common scientific and engineering challenges to mutual assistance in the reform of our institutions. The essence of this approach is to tap into the rich and vibrant spectrum of international research and service activities, which are at the very heart of faculty interests and enthusiasms, while simultaneously creating opportunities that can be embedded in the core of undergraduate curricula. The current project builds on work to date in this promising arena by creating a small alliance of universities, both within the US and worldwide, which will collaborate on further refining, scaling-up, and institutionalizing this approach to integrating international research, education and service. There are several design features to this multinational project-based strategy. Prioritized projects : 1) Are embedded in genuine faculty research interests on all sides; 2) Can take place within curricular structures that affect large numbers of undergraduate students on all sides, rather than the fortunate few; 3) Contribute to the solution of practical regional problems, and 4) Invoke deep partnerships with other allies, including industry, state and local government, and non-profit organizations. A collaboration on first-year engineering design with Tohoku University, in Sendai, Japan, has been created and is currently in its third year. A four-year collaborative project on environmental challenges facing two regions with Sichuan University, in Chengdu, China has been launched. To further catalyze a fundamental re-formulation of international education and research, this project is supporting two major activities. The first is to help seed the creation of a small alliance of institutions, each of which shares the vision of strategically coupling undergraduate education reform to the solution of complex regional problems. This is particularly important in increasing the range of diversity of institutions that are able to participate. The second is to disseminate the lessons learned by the core group concerning the pragmatics of multinational collaborations that integrate education and research. The University of Washington has made a major commitment to the success of this project, including faculty release time, staff support and cash, totalling approximately 50% of the amount requested from the National Science Foundation.