Two faculty members from the American University in Bulgaria will be exploring a new way to enhance their classes by connecting with a companion class in another nation this year. Asli Goksoy, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, and David Wallace, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, will be part of an international course sharing project called Global Course Connections (GCC). This pilot project is designed to enrich each shared course with an international perspective through direct exchange between students and faculty members on two campuses in two different countries as they jointly progress through similar curricular components of the linked courses. 

In the spring semester Asli Goksoy will be linking her course, Organizational Behavior, with a similar class being taught at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. Together with Professor Monteze Snyder, her colleague in the U.S., Asli plans to promote course interactions between AUBG students and Earlham students by forming multinational student teams to collaborate on projects, providing each class with common readings and coordinated lectures. The faculty partners will draw on case studies from international corporations, ideally using some form of internet technology to support real time joint student work. 



David Wallace will link his Spring 2013 course on Race and Ethnicity in the Arts, Languages and Literature Department with a similar course begin taught in the Sociology/Anthropology Department at Denison University, Granville, Ohio, USA. He and Associate Professor Veerendre Lele, his faculty partner at Denison, plan to examine issues surrounding race and ethnicity in a variety of national contexts.  Both classes will be studying the experience of Native Americans and African Americans in North America.  Both classes will also consider parallel issues for marginalized groups in parts of Europe and Asia.  Dr. Wallace hopes to employ a web-based course platform so that students from both schools can work and collaborate within the same structure.



The Global Course Connections Project (GCC) is one of several initiatives of the Global Liberal Arts Alliance, a multinational higher education alliance coordinated by the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. AUBG is one of the founding member institutions of the Global Liberal Arts Alliance. Asli Goksoy and David Wallace participated in a meeting of the Global Liberal Arts Alliance in Athens, Greece this June where they worked closely with their faculty partners on planning the upcoming shared classes.

Find a list of the twelve connected courses offered during the 2012-13 academic year here.