Monday, February 18, 2002

Russian Students Experience American Political Science Through Distance Learning By BROCK READ "The Soviet Union may have disappeared into history 10 years ago," says Coit D. Blacker, deputy director of Stanford University's Institute for International Studies, but "the damage inflicted upon the social sciences and humanities in Russia was profound." Through a Stanford program, Mr. Blacker and his colleagues are attempting to repair some of the damage -- by giving Russian students a taste of an American political-science classroom. Last quarter, the university's Initiative on Distance Learning -- a branch of Mr. Blacker's institute -- introduced the first in a three-year series of political-science courses delivered to Russian universities through CD-ROMs and online learning. The initial offering, "International Security in a Changing World," was taught by Mr. Blacker and a team of Stanford political scientists. This quarter's course, "International Environmental Politics," is led by Ronald Mitchell, an associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon and former visiting scholar at Stanford. Like its predecessor, the course will be taught to students at four Russian institutions: Petrozavodsk State University, Southern Ural State University, Ural State University, and Yaroslavl State University. Stanford pays to develop and produce the courses, which at present are free to Russian students. The Russian universities, however, may soon add small course fees, "to make sure that the students who sign into the course take it seriously," says Mr. Blacker. In the courses, every student receives a CD-ROM containing video recordings of English-language lectures in Stanford classes. The lectures are given by a variety of speakers, including each course's professor, other Stanford faculty members, and outside specialists. After viewing each lecture, the Russian students meet with professors at their institutions to review important themes. They then participate in weekly online chat sessions with their peers at all four universities and with Stanford graduate students, who act as teaching assistants. Occasionally, professors or guest speakers who appear on the CD-ROM take part in the chats. Students interact further through a bulletin board on which they post short weekly assignments reacting to the lectures and to English and Russian reading assignments. They also take midterm and final examinations. Sixty students participated in the international-security course. Katherine Kuhns, managing director of the Initiative on Distance Learning, credits the Russian professors who publicized the course and screened students for ensuring that participants could complete the course. The only prerequisites for the courses are competence in English and an interest in political science. The students who enrolled in the international-security class -- including political-science majors, journalists, psychologists, and law students -- "were already the cream of the crop," Ms. Kuhns says. The collaboration among professors at the universities extends beyond the screening process. Grading duties are split between Stanford's teaching staff and Russian instructors, and the hometown professors help their students surmount problems with the language barrier. "Dialogue [between the sites] is integral to the learning process," says Ms. Kuhns. The local professors, she adds, "are our eyes and ears on the ground." The Stanford professors, meanwhile, must take into account the "steep learning curve" that Mr. Blacker says Russian students face in trying to adapt to American ways of teaching social science. Russian instruction in the field "tends to be just a recitation of the facts," he says. In taping the lectures, the program developers at Stanford made a point of including scenes of interaction between professors and students. "We took a camera crew into the classroom," says Ms. Kuhns, "and tried as much as possible to capture the setting." Larichev Alexander, a law student at Petrozavodsk State University, wrote in a review of the course that exposure to a new learning environment helped him "destroy old inner stereotypes." "Stanford coordinators should know that the view on the issues they introduced was completely different from what I as an ordinary Russian citizen had," he wrote. Mr. Blacker says that the Russian students learned the ins and outs of critical discussion quite quickly. "We were astounded at the increase in quality between the first set of essays and the last set of essays" submitted to the class bulletin board, he says. "We've been gratified at the response to the initiative from the Russian universities, faculties, and students," says Mr. Blacker. In fact, Stanford is in the process of expanding the program to include more courses and institutions. Next year, a third course -- "Democracy, Civil Society, and Terrorism" -- will be added to the curriculum, and seven universities will participate. By the 2003-4 academic year, four courses will be offered to 10 institutions. Stanford will then re-evaluate the program. Mr. Blacker hopes it will expand to other republics of the former Soviet Union. One way of ensuring the project's future, he adds, is to develop what he calls "an offset strategy," in which Stanford offers the course at cost to Western students. "If we can continue to identify and secure support, I hope and expect that [the program] will continue to grow beyond the first three years," he says. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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