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Digital Encounters: Using Information Technology in an Overseas Branch Campus
Benjamin Reilly
Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar
| IN FALL OF 2004, Carnegie Mellon University embarked on a bold educational experiment, the establishment of an overseas branch campus at Education City in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. Carnegie Mellon's decision to open up shop in the Middle East was by no means unique; indeed, as we shall shortly see, Carnegie Mellon is just one of a growing number of institutions to join the burgeoning overseas branch campus phenomenon. More innovative was Carnegie Mellon's decision, in the fall of 2005, to inaugurate a new academic program that employed cutting edge telecommunications technology to create a real-time, seamless intercontinental learning environment for a pioneer class of twenty three American and Qatari students. Although the class encountered challenges, technological and otherwise, it is my belief that U.S.-Arab Encounters may serve as a model for future collaborations between U.S.-based campuses and their increasingly numerous overseas branches.1 |
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This essay has three primary goals. First of all, in order to put the U.S.-Arab Encounters experiment into perspective, I will carry out a brief survey of the branch campus phenomenon as a whole, with a particular focus on the reasons for its dramatic expansion in recent years, especially into the Middle East. Secondly, this paper will make a case for the important role that inter-campus courses such as U.S.-Arab Encounters can play in a branch campus setting, particularly in terms of their ability to enhance the inherent advantages offered by overseas branch campuses while simultaneously mitigating some of the problems that those same campuses can pose to the mother institution. Finally, this paper will address some of the challenges we faced in the implementation of this innovative class as a guide to educators who might seek to provide similar inter-campus academic programs in the future. |
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Turning first to the branch campus phenomenon, I should say from the outset that the establishment of overseas branch campuses is by no means a new idea. One well-known early example is the Harvard School of Medicine in China, which operated from 1911–1916. Harvard was only one of a number of American institutions to experiment with Chinese branch campuses during this period of relative calm in China's tumultuous twentieth-century history. For the most part, however, the overseas branch campus phenomenon is a modern development, fueled largely by recent advances in communication technology. |
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So how widespread are overseas branch campuses in academia today? This is a difficult question to answer, in part because there is currently no recognized standard as to what exactly constitutes a legitimate branch campus. To further complicate matters, academic institutions can be linked to overseas counterparts in a bewildering number of ways. Some overseas institutions, such as the American University of Beirut and the American University of Cairo, were not founded by any particular American academic institution, but rather run accredited programs using an American-style curriculum. Other colleges claim affiliation with American or European institutions, though in some cases, these ties amount to only the occasional swap of an exchange student or the importation of an overseas curriculum without adequate training or oversight. Indeed, a number of American institutions have recently disavowed their connection to poorly-run or substandard overseas programs. Other American schools offer overseas degree-granting programs which cater not to students from the host country, but to American military personnel serving abroad. Still other schools have created hybrid campuses in which faculty from the overseas institutions work together with a host institution to offer a joint degree. In such programs, the host institution generally provides the facility and the faculty for core courses while the overseas institution provides the specialized instructors to teach the more advanced classes in the curriculum. Given these multitudinous ways in which academic institutions might be linked to overseas counterparts, deciding whether a given campus can be classified as a legitimate "branch campus" is often a rather subjective determination. |
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As a consequence, when compiling my own list of branch campuses for this study, I decided for clarity's sake to define the subject matter as narrowly as possible. For our purposes, a "branch campus" is an institution that 1) grants bachelor's degrees, 2) was founded by an academic institution based in another country, 3) follows that institution's curriculum, 4) caters predominantly to students in the host country, and 5) does not depend on the faculty or facilities of any academic institutions within the host country. Despite the narrowness of this definition, I was able to identify 49 schools in existence as of September 2007 that can be classified as branch campuses.2 A complete list of these campuses, including founding institution, location, and date of inauguration can be found in the Appendix. |
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As is clear from this list, the development of the "branch campus" phenomenon has been characterized by both long-term trends and short-term spurts of activity. One constant theme has been the steady establishment of American branch campuses in Europe, partly as an offshoot of semester abroad programs established by American universities. In addition, three major short-term 'waves' of branch campus formation are evident. The first wave was predominantly made up of U.S. programs in Japan, and can be seen in this list through the vestigial survival of Temple University and Lakeland University's Japanese branch campuses. This early wave, which may have involved as many as 40 U.S. schools, peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the height of Japan's prosperity and the apex of its student body population, and then crashed soon after due to the decline of the Japanese college-age demographic and the onset of ten years of recession in Japan starting in 1991.3 The second wave washed ashore in South Asia during the second half of the 1990s, and was largely fueled by fiscal reforms in the Australian University system that encouraged Australian universities to actively establish branch campuses in nearby Asian nations as a way of bolstering declining state revenues.4 |
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As for the third wave, which is currently inundating the countries on the edge of the Persian Gulf, a little more explanation is in order. The original impetus was provided by the government of the tiny but petroleum rich state of Qatar, which established the Qatar Foundation in 1995 in order to ensure that the country developed the educated professional class it would need to survive in the global economy after the petroleum inevitably becomes depleted. Before founding "Education City," Qatar experimented with sending its brightest students to study higher education abroad, but this strategy was flawed, in part because Qatari parents were hesitant to expose their children (especially female children) to western influences, and in part because the expatriate students often chose to settle down in the countries where they studied, thus denying the fruits of their education to Qatar. To address these concerns, Qatar has invited a number of American universities with top programs in fields that are seen as strategically valuable to the Qatari state to establish branch campuses in Qatar's sprawling Education City facility. So far, six universities have accepted Qatar's invitation, and this number is expected to rise over time. |
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Three other recent trends have also conspired to bring branch campuses to the Gulf region. High oil prices have increased the wealth and, consequently, the attractiveness of the Gulf region as a theatre of investment, educational or otherwise. In a related vein, Dubai's developing "Academic City" and "Knowledge Village" institutions, which are best understood as ambitious real estate projects built around an educational theme, have drawn a number of branch campuses to the United Arab Emirates. Perhaps the most important explanation for the recent spike in Middle Eastern branch campuses, however, lies in the events of September 11th, which created a perfect storm of difficulties for prospective overseas applicants to American academia. Overseas students suddenly found themselves facing heightened visa restrictions and unexpectedly long visa processing delays. Other would-be applicants were discouraged by increased governmental limitations on foreign student access to certain types of information that U.S. authorities deemed to be sensitive. What is more, many prospective students from the Middle East have been dissuaded from attending American academia by fear of prejudice or persecution in post-9/11 America. Largely as a consequence of these factors, overall international enrollment in top U.S. research universities has dropped in recent years by 20–30%.5 Small wonder, then, that a growing number of universities are bringing the mountain to Mohammed, as it were, through the establishment of overseas branch campuses in the Persian Gulf. |
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Wherever located, branch campuses offer the original campus a number of attractive potential advantages. Most obviously, branch campuses offer the founding universities considerable new sources of revenue, either from overseas student tuitions or from direct financial support from the government or business community of the host nation. Branch campuses offer non-monetary incentives to founding institutions as well. Students in the main campus may benefit from the expanded semester abroad possibilities that overseas branch campuses provide. Academic initiatives spearheaded in branch campuses can lead to unexpected benefits for the main campus. Perhaps most crucially from an educational standpoint, branch campuses allow main campuses to fulfill their goal of broadening student perspectives by putting students into regular contact with overseas colleagues that have quite different religious, cultural, and political outlooks. Indeed, Carnegie Mellon's U.S.-Arab Encounters class was developed with precisely that objective in mind. |
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Despite these advantages, the foundation of branch campuses also entails a number of potential risks. The most obvious risk is financial failure, as the collapse of the first "Japanese wave" of branch campuses clearly demonstrated. What is more, an institution establishing a branch campus runs the risk of tarnishing its international reputation if it cannot demonstrate that the education it provides in its overseas campuses is equivalent to the education it provides in the main campus setting. This was a particular concern for Carnegie Mellon University, where international students make up more than 12% of the total undergraduate population. Carnegie Mellon could ill-afford to alienate this important body of students by offering a substandard degree overseas. |
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The advantage of simultaneously-taught inter-campus courses like U.S.-Arab Encounters is that they allow schools to maximize some of the opportunities branch campuses offer to the main campus while simultaneously minimizing the risks. U.S.-Arab Encounters offered both the Pittsburgh and Qatari students the opportunity to expand their intellectual horizons by immersing them in a fully interactive classroom environment that effectively erased the distance between the two classes, enabling them to engage each other in earnest conversation about issues of mutual concern. At the same time, the very fact that the two student bodies are engaged in one class with a common syllabus and common course expectations helps to standardize the continuity of academic standards between the main and branch institutions, thus helping to ensure that the degree granted in Qatar has the same weight as the degree from the Pittsburgh campus. |
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Before moving on to the technological solutions that made this path-breaking class possible, I should say a few words about the course itself. In terms of content, Dr. Laurie Eisenberg (my Pittsburgh counterpart) and I opted to explore America's often-troubled relationship with the Middle East, from the Orientalism of Mark Twain to the anti-Americanism of modern Islamists, with a particular focus on America's engagement with Iraq, Israel, the Gulf States, and the Palestinians. We also explored the issue of identity, mainly through the use of surveys that forced students to address and articulate their unspoken assumptions, thus serving as a means to discuss the political and cultural schisms that existed both between and within the two halves of the class. |
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As far as we were concerned, however, the course content was of somewhat secondary importance: our primary goal was to create a space in which students at each campus could engage in direct discussions with their overseas counterparts, not as two separate but interacting classes, but rather as a single, seamless whole. To construct this environment, we enlisted the services of the Carnegie Mellon IT department, which provided us with the necessary classrooms and teleconferencing equipment. Weill-Cornell Medical School in Qatar, which was hosting CMUQ at the time of the class, had already constructed a teleconferencing classroom on the Doha campus, equipped with PTZ (pan, tilt, and zoom) video cameras, desktop microphones, a speaker system, and a large two-panel video screen. A similar classroom was custom-built in Pittsburgh, at a cost of roughly $150,000, over the summer of 2005. As a result of this arrangement, students in each classroom sat facing a screen which by default displayed a wide angle frontal shot of the students in the other campus, creating the illusion that the two classes sat opposite each other across a gap of several yards rather than 7,000 miles. Microphone toggles at each student's seat allowed students to directly address their overseas counterparts on either a group or on an individual basis, and camera controls allowed instructors to transmit close-up shots of individual students to the other campus. |
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It is my belief that this arrangement not only replicated face-to-face discussion, but was actually preferable to physically bringing students from one campus to another. Had we done so, class discussion would have been hampered, as the guest students would almost certainly have been hesitant to express strong disagreements with their hosts. Thanks to teleconferencing technology, however, students in each campus addressed each other from within their own campus and amidst their own peers, thus facilitating the frank and honest exchange of views. Contacts between the two classes were further promoted through group projects that paired students off with their overseas counterparts, requiring them to collaborate with members of the other class via e-mail or instant messaging. As a result, by the end of the course, the division between the two halves of the class had become blurred, and students in the course began to think in terms of "we" rather than "us" and "them." Indeed, I am gratified to say that the ties between students in the two campuses have proven to be enduring, and many students in each class remain in regular contact with their overseas counterparts even now, over a year after the class ended. |
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Overall, we found the technological solutions crafted by the Pittsburgh and Qatar IT department to be quite satisfactory, although there were occasional hiccups. The feed between the two campuses sometimes failed, and in at least one instance, the Qatar class had to reconvene in a cramped teleconferencing suite due to technical difficulties in our regular venue. Dr. Eisenberg and I also had intermittent (and often hilarious) difficulties operating the camera system. As for the students, they quickly adapted to the technological requirements of the setting, and soon became quite adept at toggling their microphones on and off during class discussions—even when addressing a member of the same class—to ensure that students on the other campus could listen in on an intra-class debate. That being said, we could never quite get the students to adopt the counterintuitive habit of facing the camera rather than the video screen when speaking to the other class, to the point that Dr. Eisenberg and I toyed with the idea of surrounding the cameras with photos of students in the other class as a reminder. |
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There was room for improvement in other ways as well. The two-screen system we employed—one screen showing the input from the other class, the other showing what the other class was receiving—made it somewhat cumbersome to incorporate visual materials such as overheads and Powerpoint presentations into the lectures. Thankfully, the new facility being designed in Qatar for Carnegie Mellon University will be able to accommodate three active feeds at once, making it far easier to include visual material into class instruction. What is more, a great deal of class time was lost while Dr. Eisenberg or I manually focused the camera on a specific student, but this problem too could be solved by programming each microphone button to activate a camera preset, thus allowing the camera to focus automatically on the student who is speaking. |
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One difficulty that technology was helpless to overcome, however, was the tyranny of the time zones. As a result of the 8-hour time zone difference, we were forced to run the class at less than ideal times on both campuses—early morning in Pittsburgh, late afternoon in Qatar. This not only proved to be a hardship for students attending the course, it also discouraged overall enrollment in the course, especially on the Qatar campus, where the beginning of the late afternoon class overlapped with Iftar, the sundown breaking of the Ramadan fast. The same time zone problems will likely limit Carnegie Mellon's ability to offer many more co-taught classes in the future, since, unless more $150,000-facilities are constructed, additional two-campus classes will be obliged to run in increasingly unattractive early morning or late evening time slots due to scheduling problems. The fact that Pittsburgh turned its clocks back an hour in the middle of the semester for daylight savings, while Qatar did not, further complicated an already difficult situation. |
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The time zone issue posed considerable difficulties for inter-class communications as well. Outside of regular class time, e-mail was the standard means of communication, but the time zone difference meant that e-mails sent in a Qatari morning arrived long after bedtime in Pittsburgh. The fact that the two weekends did not entirely overlap—Qatar's weekend is Friday and Saturday—further complicated e-mailing. As a result, e-mail correspondence suffered from delays lasting hours or even days. To avoid this, we hope to rely more on simultaneous means of communication in future classes. Instant messaging (IM) software is one such means; indeed, we hope to convince all students and faculty to subscribe to a single IM service at the start of the next class. We also plan to encourage students to subscribe to a common voice-over-IP service (for example, Skype), allowing students to speak to each other at little or no cost over an internet connection. We might also provide more non-synchronous avenues for the students to interact, such as by hosting discussion boards on the class website, or by encouraging them to maintain blogs (web logs) to post their opinions of the issues discussed in class sessions. |
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Despite these various technological and logistical difficulties, from an educational perspective, U.S.-Arab encounters proved to be an overwhelming success. In post-class interviews, students reported that the class had profoundly changed how they thought about the "other." Some students were surprised to find that the students of the other class were not the monolithic bloc they had imagined, but rather were sharply divided in their opinions. Noora Al-Subai in the Qatar campus told us U.S.-Arab Encounters "exposed me to the diversity of opinions in the [Pittsburgh] class." Similarly, Pittsburgh student Quelcy Kogel was surprised to learn that "Arab students define themselves so strongly by nationality." What is more, students in each campus began to realize what they had in common with their overseas compatriots. "In the beginning it felt like we had very different perspectives [but] by the end we had much more mutual respect and understanding about how the other side thinks," declared Qatar campus student Jasmine Abdulrahman. |
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Students in both classes also told us that participating in U.S.-Arab Encounters made them more aware of their own beliefs and misconceptions. According to Quelcey Kogel, "[U.S.-Arab Encounters] really made me re-evaluate what it meant to be an American." Pittsburgh campus student James Galloway claimed that U.S.-Arab encounters had greatly widened his knowledge of the Middle East, admitting that before taking the course "a lot of us [in Pittsburgh]... had only known about the region through September 11th and news stories about terrorism." Jasmine reported that U.S.-Arab Encounters "highlighted and brought out the deep biases... not only of the other group, but our own—and helped to identify the roots of the biases." |
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Finally, students told us that they were thankful for the opportunity that U.S.-Arab Encounters gave them to discuss some of the most pressing political issues of the modern day. Qatar campus student Hala Abbas reported that the many staged debates in the U.S.-Arab Encounters class vastly improved her understanding of the issues, "especially when I was forced to pick a position against my own beliefs." Omar Shams, a Qatar campus student who has since relocated to the Pittsburgh campus, told us that the debates gave him the opportunity to bridge the gap between "data" and "information:" "I realize now that although I had a lot of data before the class, I've now pieced it together and I feel that I have information." Most tellingly of all, a student writing anonymously in a post-class survey told us that U.S.-Arab Encounters provided "a safe place to express oneself on volatile topics" and "the discussions [were] extremely informative and interesting." We were very gratified to read this comment, because it neatly encapsulated our overall goals when designing U.S.-Arab Encounters |
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It is likely that, due to the rapid evolution of both the U.S.-Arab relationship and of teleconferencing technology, the next iteration of U.S.-Arab Encounters will take a somewhat different form from the class we taught in the fall of 2005. Nonetheless, one fact is indisputable: inter-campus academic classes like U.S.-Arab Encounters are likely to become more and more common over time. Dramatic recent improvements in telecommunication technology—fueled by the doubling of the speed of computer microprocessors approximately every eighteen months over the past decade6—combined with a burgeoning demand for a western education in the non-western world, will likely ensure the expansion of the branch campus phenomenon for the foreseeable future. Indeed, no less than 26 new branch campuses have sprung up since 2000, 16 of them in the Persian Gulf region alone. Each of these new campuses holds enormous potential benefits to the main campus, especially in terms of broadening student perspectives on both the main and branch campus, but also carries the risk of tarnishing the reputation of the main campus if the degree granted is perceived as inferior to that which the main campus provides. It is my belief that the model established by Carnegie Mellon University's U.S.-Arab Encounters class offers an elegant means both to maximize the benefits of inter-campus student interaction and to minimize the risks of denaturing the degree that accompany the establishment of an overseas branch campus. |
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Notes
1. My sincere thanks to Dan Hague, Anita Reilly, John Robertson, and Laurie Eisenberg for their research and editorial assistance. Thanks as well to the Qatar Foundation for its financial support.
2. The Observatory for Borderless Higher Education estimated that there were approximately 100 international branch campuses in existence as of 2007, based on a somewhat less restrictive definition: "an entity trading directly as a branch of the parent institution, recruiting primarily local students, and attempting to replicate breadth of function of the parent institution (e.g. research as well as teaching)." More details on the OBHE findings, and a list of further readings, are available at http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/Commdocs/hearings/2007/full/26jul/altbach_appendix_1.pdf. See also Grant McBurnie and Christopher Ziguras, "The International Branch Campus," World Education News and Reviews, 2005. Available online at http://www.wes.org/ewenr/05may/feature.htm (accessed 15 September 2007).
3. Fujio Ohmori, "Japan and Transnational Higher Education," World Education News and Reviews, May/June 2005. Available online at http://www.wes.org/ewenr/05may/feature.htm (accessed 22 October 2006).
4. Burton Bollag, "America's Hot New Export: Higher Education," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 February 2006. Available online at http://www.buffalo.edu/news/pdf/Feb06/ChronicleDunnettIntlPrograms.pdf (accessed 22 October 2006).
5. Robert Gates, "Land of the Freeze," The Economist: the World in 2005 (2004), 32–33.
6. Glenn Shive, "U.S. Distance Learning and Overseas Advising Services," The Advising Quarterly, Summer 1999. Available on-line through http://www.amideast.org (accessed 11/7/2005).
Appendix
Branch Campuses offering Bachelor's Degrees as of September 2007
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| Name of Founding Institution |
Location of Institution |
Location of Branch Campus |
Date Branch was founded |
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| Alliant University5 |
USA |
Mexico |
1970 |
| Webster University |
USA |
Switzerland |
1978 |
| Webster University |
USA |
Austria |
1981 |
| Temple University |
USA |
Japan |
1982 |
| Webster University |
USA |
The Netherlands |
1983 |
| Webster University |
USA |
Great Britain |
1986 |
| University of Indianapolis |
USA |
Greece |
1989 |
| Georgia Institute of Technology |
USA |
France |
1990 |
| Lakeland College6 |
USA |
Japan |
1991 |
| Johnson and Wales |
USA |
Sweden |
1992 |
| RMIT University |
Australia |
Malaysia |
1996 |
| Endicott College7 |
USA |
Mexico |
1996 |
| Saint Louis University8 |
USA |
Spain |
19969 |
| Rochester Institute of Technology |
USA |
Croatia |
1997 |
| Monash University |
Australia |
Malaysia |
1998 |
| Central Queensland University |
Australia |
Fiji |
1998 |
| Swinburne University of Technology |
Australia |
Thailand |
1998 |
| Curtin University |
Australia |
Malaysia |
1999 |
| University of Wollongong |
Australia |
United Arab Emirates |
1999 |
| Virginia Commonwealth University |
USA |
Qatar |
1999 |
| Florida State University |
USA |
Panama |
1999 |
| Webster University |
USA |
Thailand |
1999 |
| CHN University |
Holland |
Qatar |
2000 |
| University of Nottingham |
UK |
Malaysia |
2000 |
| Swinburne University of Technology |
Australia |
Malaysia |
2000 |
| Birla Institute of Technology and Science |
India |
United Arab Emirates |
2000 |
| Monash University |
Australia |
South Africa |
2001 |
| College of the North Atlantic10 |
Canada |
Qatar |
2001 |
| Cornell University Medical School11 |
USA |
Qatar |
2002 |
| Swinburne University of Technology |
Australia |
Vietnam |
2002 |
| RMIT University |
Australia |
Vietnam |
2003 |
| Rochester Institute of Technology12 |
USA |
Kosovo |
2003 |
| Mahatma Gandhi University |
India |
United Arab Emirates |
2003 |
| Texas A&M |
USA |
Qatar |
2003 |
| University of Buffalo |
USA |
Singapore |
2003 |
| Mahe-Manepal Academy of Higher Ed. |
India |
United Arab Emirates |
2003 |
| SZABIST |
Pakistan |
United Arab Emirates |
2003 |
| Carnegie Mellon University |
USA |
Qatar |
2004 |
| University of Northern Virginia |
USA |
Czech Republic |
2004 |
| Islamic Azad University |
Iran |
United Arab Emirates |
2004 |
| Georgetown University |
USA |
Qatar |
2005 |
| University of Nottingham |
UK |
China |
2005 |
| Middlesex University |
UK |
United Arab Emirates |
2005 |
| Roger Williams University13 |
USA |
Vietnam |
2005 |
| University of Paris- Sorbonne |
France |
United Arab Emirates |
2006 |
| George Mason University |
USA |
United Arab Emirates |
2006 |
| Heriot-Watt University |
UK |
United Arab Emirates |
2006 |
| University of Nevada at Las Vegas |
USA |
Singapore |
2006 |
| University of Calgary |
Canada |
Qatar |
2007 |
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- Originally called United States International University, later assumed present name.
- 2-year program only, students then transfer to American Campus.
- 2-year program only, students then transfer to American Campus.
- Caters to about 50% American study abroad students, 50% Europeans. Offers both degrees earned completely in Spain as well as option to transfer after 2–3 years to American main campus.
- Originally founded in the 1960s as a semester abroad location—1996 is when its degree became recognized by the provincial higher education authority within Spain.
- 3-year diploma program only.
- Does not grant a B.A., but accepts students directly from high school for a 6-year M.D. program; also offers two-year certificate program.
- Operated as the American University of Kosovo, but RIT administered and staffed.
- 2-year program only, students then transfer to American Campus.
Note: Entries in bold type represent the first branch campus founded by a given university, while entries in regular type represent subsequent campuses founded by the same institution.
Please send any corrections or suggestions concerning this list to breilly2@qatar.cmu.edu.
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