When Tennessee Tech and Japan’s Dohto University teamed up last year to offer students an international Internet course for the first time, it was a technological collaboration with a global impact.

And Bob Clougherty, director of our Institute for Technological Scholarship, recently had the opportunity to see just how global that impact is.

He and graduate student Jessie Holt took a week-long trip to Japan, where they visited Dohto University and gave a presentation about the collaborative class at a WebCT conference.

WebCT, or Web Course Tools, is a program that allows instructors and students to coordinate course work via the Internet, and because of our progressive use of the program, we've had the distinction of being considered a WebCT Institute.

“Our presentation at the WebCT Japan conference seemed to generate a lot of interest among some of the nation’s more prominent universities and smaller schools alike,” Clougherty says. “I expect to see similar educational partnerships developing in the future between other American and foreign universities.”

Visiting the Dohto campus was also beneficial because it illustrated the cultural differences that sometimes limit the level of communication and interaction that’s possible.

“I brought back a number of good ideas to help students adapt to the class in the future,” Clougherty says.

In addition to the significant time difference between our two countries, other differences include the propensity of Dohto students to use cell phones instead of personal computers for electronic communication and limited computer lab availability.

“We seem to have the appliances for technology, while they seem to have the attitude for it, but that just goes to show how much we can learn from each other in spite of the distance,” says Holt. “In fact, I think those distance and language barriers will make both cultures more precise in their communication.”