On a recent day, sophomore Tristan Price and his team – students from Penn State Beaver’s ENGL 202D class as well as technology students from FATEC-Bauru School of Technology in Brazil – worked through different ideas on how to make vaccination in both Brazil and the United States run more smoothly.
It’s not your typical group project with students sitting around a table talking. Not only are the two groups separated by nearly 5,000 miles, but the discussions weren’t even conducted in real time. The technology with which the students communicated was chat.
They settled on an application for mobile devices that would assist in clarifying the steps and carrying out the process to get a vaccination appointment. Once the user has an appointment, the application would remind them when and where via push notification, the team determined.
Price explained the app would help to cut down on confusion, long lines full of unvaccinated individuals and excruciating wait times.
After the Brazilian students came up with the app idea, the business English students took over and wrote a proposal for the app as if they were writing to possible investors.
Price is grateful for his ability to participate in the project through his business English class because he said that this is a collaboration that he has never had the privilege of experiencing before.
This is just one look at Experiential Digital Global Engagement, or EDGE as it is commonly called on campus. EDGE enables students from across Penn State to interact with students at other colleges from all around the world.
Students from Penn State Beaver have not just been collaborating with students from FATEC, they have also gotten to know some of the Brazilian students very well.
Junior Rita Metzger said that EDGE had been amazing, as she had been able to connect and befriend students from another country.
“I feel that I’ve made friends for life,” Metzger said.
Assistant Teaching Professor of English Tiffany MacQuarrie not only teaches the ENGL 202D class collaborating with students from Brazil, she’s also the professor in charge of EDGE.
MacQuarrie initiated collaborating with FATEC this semester at a virtual Collaborative Online International Learning summit.
MacQuarrie explained that there is a considerable amount of time put into creating the collaborative projects as she must work with the instructors from other colleges. She has to figure out how the necessary topics that encompass her curriculum fit with the curriculum in classes at the college she’s working with.
The two classes worked in a symbiotic relationship where they were perpetually helping one another. The FATEC technical students introduced the English students to the ins and outs of the way phone applications work and the Penn State Beaver students taught the FATEC students how to write effectively and concisely.
MacQuarrie said she loves introducing her students to EDGE as it helps them put their troubles into perspective by comparing personal issues with world issues.
“A few semesters ago, we were collaborating with the Arava Institute in Israel and we were having remote lectures as part of our collaboration,” MacQuarrie said. “They had to cancel class the same day as they were fearing for their lives because bullets were being fired in the streets.”
Metzger learned many things about the Brazilian students she was working with, but she said the most compelling thing she learned was that Brazil is experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic this year as the United States had last April. She was shocked to find out how terrified they are as the United States is growing less and less afraid of the virus as the days go by.
“They’re completely shut down,” Metzger said. “Over 300,000 people have died.”