Global classroom: A case study in online learning on sustainable cities

A new learning opportunity among civil engineering students is learning about urbanization in cities, which combines the sub-disciplines of civil engineering in a seamlessly interdisciplinary manner. One of the greatest benefits of learning about a global phenomenon such as urbanization is introducing the opportunities to offer examples of the technological, cultural and social diversity surrounding the evolution of urban design, technologies and sustainable strategies from global cities. The ability to have a globally diverse classroom to bring in these perspectives and create a learning experience that captures this information sharing and exchange can be created through course design, learning activities, and assessments, hence the “global classroom.” The authors present a case study of the global classroom for the online course “Sustainable Cities: Adding an African Perspective” and share their perspective on learner-driven formats that support the global classroom, which hinges upon students’ own interest and commitment to an online learning format.The authors would like to thank the team behind the Engineering Education for Sustainable Cities Project (EESC-A), and members of the Education Technology Office at the University of Toronto who led the design and building of the modules, and the students and instructors at the African universities who participated in the global classroom, and the students at the MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program at the University of Toronto. The course production was funded as part of the Engineering Education for Sustainable Cities in Africa(EESC-A), which was funded by the Dean’s Strategic Fund, Connaught Global Challenges Award, and the Learning and Education Advancement Fund (LEAF). The resources mentioned in this paper are all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License