The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been collaborating since 2010 with the Singapore Ministry of Education to help develop the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). One element of this collaboration, the Global Leadership Program (GLP), aims to provide SUTD students with the opportunity to interact with the MIT community and experience MIT's academic culture, while at the same time participating in programming to assist with the development of leadership skills. This paper describes a curriculum combining the pedagogies of design-based learning and wilderness education that was implemented in the summer of 2014 as a component of GLP. Wilderness education was selected as a pedagogical framework for this program as it may be well suited to create effective learning environments for engineering education, cross-cultural learning, and fostering conceptual change. Through design activities both for and in a natural environment, students were encouraged to develop competency in engineering science while exploring the diverse attributes essential for success as an engineer.

Expatriation as confusion and loss of control; adjustment as surfing the waves of expatriation; and international assignment as a life-transforming experience. These are the major themes that form the complex thread of how U.S. expatriates made meaning of their international assignment experience to develop cross-cultural learning. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) guided this study journey to explore how cross-cultural learning was experienced by U.S. expatriates on assignments for U.S. organizations in Brazil. By adopting IPA, this study presented a rich description of participants’ lived experiences, and a detailed exploration and interpretation of meaning. A review of the literature found little research specifically on expatriates’ learning factors and content, as empirical research on expatriates’ cross-cultural learning tends to be limited to lists of skills needed. Thus, this field of study lacks an integrated theoretical framework of expatriates’ learning process, and contextualization of the unique challenges they face. Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning theory (ELT) was used as the theoretical framework and analytical lens in this study, unfolding the learning processes embedded in cultural differences in a contextualized manner. ELT allowed this study to focus on the interaction between the individual and the environment, providing a richer meaning of cross-cultural learning practices on international assignments. This study also provides recommendations for practice and future research.

In recent years, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become one of the most important innovations in global higher education. Another important trend is the rise of online content aggregators, such as Coursera, edX, and FutureLearn. Coursera, the leading aggregator, by May 2020, had surpassed 56 million subscribed learners globally offering 4,500 online courses, 300 specializations, and 20 entire degrees. Since 2015, through membership in Open SUNY (online courses and entire degree programs offered through the SUNY system), SUNY Empire State College has obtained a unique opportunity to join Coursera and reach out to the world’s largest community of online learners. One of the college’s pioneers on Coursera, Val Chukhlomin, has led the development of seven Coursera MOOCs. In just four years, his MOOCs have enrolled more than 120,000 learners from more than 200 countries. In this essay, Chukhlomin shares his observations and insights into the Coursera world and discusses some of the pertinent problems. Please note that quite recently, Open SUNY merged with SUNY Online.