Staff Reporter

THE Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) is launching an innovative history course, which will also be taught simultaneously in Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh campus via web simulcast, it was announced yesterday.

The idea for such a course came from vice provost for education and professor in Engineering and Public Policy, Dr Indira Nair, after she learned of a web-based discussion forum, offered by the Boston-based company Soliyah, which was being used by several American and Middle East universities.  

“This got me thinking about how we could connect our students on two continents,” Dr Nair said.

Two faculty members, Dr Laurie Eisenberg and Dr Ben Reilly, then developed the course, which includes multinational web forum, to bring students together in a direct dialogue about American and Arab relations.

Professors Eisenberg and Reilly, from the Pittsburgh and Doha campuses respectively, have worked together to overcome the distance obstacles and create a seamless classroom experience for the students.

Students in classrooms in Pittsburgh and Doha discuss materials at the same time, via theatre-sized video screens. Challenges in teaching the course include a time difference that will increase by one hour when the US goes off daylight saving time and the complication of holding a late afternoon class during the holy month of Ramadan.

All involved agreed that the benefits of direct discussion of current events within an historical context outweighed the challenges.

“In the aftermath of the horrible events of September 11 and the bitter controversy created by the second Iraq war, there is a greater need than ever before for a direct dialogue between young American and Arab students,” observed Dr Reilly.

The web forum is being offered to universities in the US, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority by through Soliya’s Connect programme.

Using an ordinary web camera, students participate in Internet-based chats, broadening further still the dialogue. The chats augment the classroom exploration of American and Arab history, international relations, conflict resolution and media studies.

As part of the web forum, the group writes an op-ed and evaluates broadcast news footage from the BBC, Al Jazeera and MSNBC.  

“I am tremendously excited to embark on this course because it gives our students the solid historical background that they need to discuss directly, intelligently and meaningfully the very important issues currently at play in US-Arab relations,” Eisenberg said.

Another salient feature of the course is that cross-registration in Qatar Foundation’s Education City has brought students from Texas A&M University at Qatar and Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar to CMU-Q to participate.  

“This is a wonderful course to pioneer cross-registration,” said CMU-Q dean Dr Charles Thorpe who expressed happiness in ‘working with the Qatar Foundation and our sister campuses to broaden the educational experience for all students at Education City.’

Reilly says it’s basic to the mission of the course to bring together a diverse group of students. The course has two goals: to enable the students to express their feelings on issues of personal relevance, and to inform those views by examining recent scholarship by some of the best authors working today in the field of US–Arab relations.

“It is my hope that such experiences will build shared understanding, and shared visions for peace among young peoples of conflicted nations; that they, as future leaders, will build bridges that offer possibilities for dialogues and compassionate compromises rather than violence and blind dogma to settle differences,” Dr Nair added.

CMU-Q is the first international branch campus operated by Carnegie Mellon University, a private American research university that’s regularly ranked among the best in the world.

It was in August 2004 that CMU-Q began offering its highly regarded undergraduate programmes in business and computer science in Education City at the invitation of the Qatar Foundation.

Work on CMU-Q’s own building is progressing in Education City. The proposed the facility is expected to open in 2007.