Background: A decade ago, the Viterbi School of Engineering opened its classroom to a few 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 thinking and backgrounds shifted the classroom dynamics, created innovative ideas, produced networking opportunities, and enriched everyone’s learning experiences and global understanding significantly. 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 iPodia program has offered many global classes to USC students and their peers at 14 Alliance universities on four continents from their local campuses directly to promote “glocal” education. iPodia’s “learning-through-diversity” pedagogy and “classrooms-without-borders” platform creates a new “iLearning” paradigm that enables students to learn together directly 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. Recent collaborations with Microsoft have advanced the platform’s hybrid learning capability to support “learners-without-borders” with multiple modes of participation and collaborations and to develop best practices for student engagement in virtual and blended learning environments.
We now call for extending the iPodia innovation across the entire spectrum of USC schools, to leverage the diversity of disciplines and thoughts to further enrich USC students’ learning experiences.
Click below for more details on the process designed to enable this expansion through generous support from the Provost’s Office USC iPodia Faculty Fellows program.