Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms

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Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms

1/20/2005

By Dian Schaffhauser

University of Florida: Looking Outside the Local Campus

To William Riffee, building the classroom of tomorrow means partnering—both with educators all over the world and with third-party service providers that really understand what the solution, technological and otherwise, should look like.

“When people ask, what is the number one reason for having distance education program, that is access,” says Riffee, Dean of the College of Pharmacy and Associate Provost for Distance Continuing and Executive Education at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “I say, we are allowing around 6,000 people get degrees from the University of Florida—high-quality, top-notch degrees—[people] who would otherwise not be able to do that. We’re changing the world one life at a time, because we’ve allowed them to have access to our programs.”

But imagine a classroom that extends from Florida east across the Atlantic to Scotland and Germany, west across the Pacific to Korea and Australia and south to Brazil, Ecuador and Peru. That’s the vision Riffee keeps in mind as he g'es about his work overseeing the campus’ efforts to globalize education, which, he says, are intended for “students who can’t, for whatever reason, come to the United States for residential study, but who want to participate in a degree program.”

While the presence in foreign countries might simply be considered another form of distance learning, the University of Florida takes a different approach: educating the faculty there and using them as support systems for students.

“We don’t want to export the American way of doing things,” says Riffee. “We spend a lot of time developing relationships with people primarily in other educational institutions. We believe very strongly in a hybrid approach to distance education, where we have face-to-face—teachers meeting with the students periodically.”

The development of these programs is long term. A current initiative underway in Brazil illustrates the process. “We’re working with the Centro Universitário de Maringa (Cesumar), a private university center—in between a community college and a full doctoral university. They’re interested in our doctor of audiology and doctor of pharmacy programs.” Over the last couple of years, joint meetings have taken place.

Shortly, the school in Brazil will identify three faculty members in each of the disciplines to obtain their degrees from UF—under a full UF-funded scholarship. “They will get their degree at no cost to them, other than some travel maybe once every couple of years to do some clinical stuff,” explains Riffee. “Once they get the degree, then we have some built-in facilitators at those institutions, that will then help us recruit new students and so forth. We will blend our science with their culture.”

When the program is proposed, the candidates “cry,” says Riffee. “‘Nobody’s ever come down from the US and said: We are so interested in working with you that we want to provide this opportunity to you so you can get a degree and you can help us work with your country to improve healthcare.’ That’s the bottom line: to improve justice or healthcare or whatever.”