UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Noel Habashy, assistant teaching professor of international agriculture and development at Penn State University Park, recently completed an Experiential Digital Global Engagement (EDGE) project with students from his course, INTAG 100N: Everyone Eats: Hunger, Food Security and Global Agriculture, and partners from Riga Stradiņš University, Latvia.
EDGE is a project-based international virtual exchange program adapted from the State University of New York’s Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) program. Habashy has participated in integrating his classes with EDGE for more than three semesters and said he plans on continuing to do so in the future.
“For many [students] this was their first time having meaningful interactions with somebody in a different part of the world.” Habashy said.
Habashy has been involved in the EDGE program through collaborations with multiple universities, his most recent being with the Riga Stradiņš University in Latvia. Having contemplated the idea of participating in an EDGE program for some time, the opportunity presented itself in the form of a grant from the organization. As part of the grant, Habashy conducted a class partnership for one semester with his colleague at the partner university, Julija Sipicina-Buhgolca. After that, Habashy and Sipicina-Buhgolca conducted two more semesters independently. During the second, Sipicina-Buhgolca moved to Riga Stradiņš University in Latvia, where they continued the EDGE program.
“Making [the opportunity to partner and work together with people in different regions of the world] more accessible has certainly been a very appealing characteristic of the program,” Habashy noted.
Habashy and Sipicina-Buhgolca brought together the students from Penn State and Riga Stradiņš University in INTAG 100N. According to Habashy, the students were tasked with examining all the social, economic and ecological factors that influence food insecurity across the world.
The Penn State students were frequently in communication with those in Latvia, using various channels.
“We had students meeting on Zoom and then they would choose a platform to continue communicating on. A lot of them chose WhatsApp. At one point we had a lot of students using Slack and we thought, you know, that would be a way for them to learn a new tool if they weren't familiar with it, but especially one that's very commonly used in sort of a corporate setting,” Habashy said.