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Top1. Introduction
Mimi is a student taking a graduate level intercultural communication course that meets on Tuesday nights at 7:30pm Eastern Standard Time. The students in her program log on from 16 time zones, some from a different location each week, joining the synchronous class from homes and workplaces in cities across the United States, military installations abroad, communities in the middle of the African continent, and from ships at sea. While she is completing the course readings and watching the asynchronous videos, her faculty is preparing to facilitate a simulation in their virtual class, pulling up notes, creating breakout rooms, finalizing instructions, and opening files she will need to share information with students. Mimi looks forward to attending class, knowing her fearless faculty will create a student-centered, interactive, and immersive learning experience.
There is a need to rethink what is possible in online classes and in the virtual spaces students and faculty inhabit. The COVID-19 pandemic “has caused the largest disruption of education in history” and the number of faculty and students engaging with each other in virtual spaces is extraordinary (United Nations, 2020, p. 5). In the unprecedented events of spring 2020, many institutions of higher education in the United States and across the globe, shifted to solely remote teaching and online learning. A transition to the virtual space of this scale and scope has never happened before and the outcome about whether this historical transition to virtual learning will create more skepticism of online pedagogies or will bolster the confidence of faculty remains to be seen.
In the United States, 6,359,121 students took at least one online class in 2017, approximately 30% of all university students (Allen et al., 2018). Even before the pandemic an upward trend in online enrollment was evident, paralleling another trend in the lives of students and faculty - increased mobility. Undergraduate students can pursue internships, military-affiliated students can complete their mission, and graduate students can conduct field research, all while completing their coursework and earning a degree. Faculty can share lessons learned from ongoing consulting projects, engage in professional development opportunities and training, and network at conferences while still engaging with students in the online classroom from wherever their work situates them at that moment in time. As academic nomads, faculty and students are participating in class discussions, learning from and collaborating with individuals from various time zones, and exposing themselves to the perspectives and worldviews of those whose lived realities vary (Gargano & Throop, 2017).
Higher education can expect both technological innovation and mobility to increase and “generally contribute to disseminate global citizenship and interculturalism and to promote self-awareness and personal growth” and mobility will “contribute to the acquisition of skills relevant to work in international settings” (Dias et al., 2021, p. 91). The mobility of ideas and people across borders and boundaries creates cultural flows that cannot be contained. As noted in the literature, “mobilities and their relations to learning within education are still understudied and undertheorized” (Leaander et al., 2010, p. 329). A decade later, the same sentiment applies. While for years education considered the “classroom-as-container” model, a conceptualization that requires physical walls, faculty now need to consider “how the (newly) imagined geographies of place, trajectory, and network critique, interact with, and push open the boundaries of the enclosed classroom” and reconceptualize a classroom without walls (Leander et al., 2010, p. 330).