Fort Hays State University in Kansas is working with universities and agencies in a number of countries to provide courses to students in those countries. But in China, their work has not been without its challenges.
China is famous for its Internet censorship policy that blocks most Web-based tools from the U.S., which makes it difficult to teach a course on global and social networking, according to a blog post by Ahmed Lachheb and Victoria Abramenka-Lachheb from Fort Hays State University. To tackle this challenge, instructional designers and faculty members found a number of Chinese social media platforms that students used in their learning.
On top of that, they also had to deal with slow bandwidth. By designing the course on a U.S. server, they could then copy that course to the servers at the Chinese partner's schools. Along with that, they uploaded audiovisual content to the course site and linked to English media content that was hosted on Chinese websites.
