International Student Classroom Interaction

I have completed my interviews. I would love to do more but I am getting to the point where I need to prototype and test. My interviewees gave me a number of things to think about with this project.

I am getting a lot of excitement from professors and a PhD student regarding my in class communication tool. I am working on a human subjects committee application today that I will hopefully file tomorrow so I can start that process.

Right now I have 3 concepts one to help with classroom interaction directly and another to help improve the sense of community in the department.

In class messaging - This would allow students to communicate through an IM type client. Right now I am looking at using twitter or possibly yahoo as the client. The reasoning behind this is that many students fear having to speak in English and prefer writing. Plus they have the opportunity to construct their thoughts. I am looking at having it be both anonymous and named. The two variations on this are a chat room style set up where everyone can see what the others are saying. The other variation is where the student sends a message directly to the instructor.

iFriends - This started out as mentor/mentee but someone pointed out that this seemed to put a hierarchy in place and make it seem more academic. I am still playing with names but iFriends is what it is right now. iFriends is a program where incoming international students are paired with second year American students. I am also looking at pairing incoming American students with second year international students. I picked iFriends since it is cross culture friendships and informatics school friendships. I am open to new names.

Culture sharing - International students would be encouraged to share their culture with other students. This would occur through cultural pages that the students generate to teach people about their culture. These pages would be shared over the summer along with the forum that we already have set up. I am also hoping to encourage more culture sharing in one of the first semester classes.

These are my core concepts. I have also been gathering things that the students mentioned were good practices from the instructors and helped them to feel more comfortable in class. I hope to take this information and put it together in to a presentation of good and back practices when dealing with international students.