Background

In 2009, the Viterbi School of Engineering opened several classrooms to peer institutions across the world and offered joint courses to be taken synchronously with students from USC and these leading universities. The pilot produced astonishing results – students’ diverse viewpoints and backgrounds shifted the classroom dynamics, created innovative ideas, generated networking opportunities, enriched the learning experience, and improved global collaboration. This innovation launched the Viterbi iPodia Program at USC and established the revenue-neutral iPodia Alliance, whose vision is “Learning Together for a Better World.” 

Since then, the Viterbi iPodia Program has offered many globally enhanced classes to USC students and their peers at 17 Alliance universities on five continents from their local campuses directly to promote “glocal” education, a fusion of global and localized learning. iPodia’s “learning-through-diversity” of perspective and lived experience pedagogy and “classrooms-without-borders” advanced hybrid learning platform creates a new “iLearning” paradigm that enables students to learn together synchronously and interactively across physical, institutional, and cultural boundaries. The pedagogy uses a smart algorithm to solicit and analyze students’ different understandings of pre-class assignments to automatically assemble cohorts with the most disparate viewpoints and guide students to share their unique perspectives during peer learning. Collaborations with Microsoft have advanced the platform’s hybrid learning capability to support “learners-without-borders” and develop best practices for student engagement in technology-powered learning environments.

Vision

“Learning Together for a Better World.” This vision is based on the three fundamental beliefs that (1) what you learn depends on with whom you learn, (2) cultural diversity can stimulate global innovation, and (3) togetherness through peer learning leads to a more peaceful, prosperous world.

Mission

Our mission is to create a state-of-the-art hybrid, synchronous learning experience that leverages contextual knowledge of different perspectives and lived experiences to promote interactive, collaborative learning that brings students together across cultures and stimulates global innovation.