The 2019/2020 academic year brought historic opportunities for faculty to manage virtual exchanges (O’Dowd, 2021), yet limited research exists on how teachers develop their capacity within these programs. As educators collaborating on a transnational virtual exchange, we aim to investigate the process that teachers go through as they co-develop and collaborate in a transnational virtual exchange from our experiences and perceptions. We ask: To what extent do previous lived experiences mediate the process of teacher capacity building in a transnational virtual, collaborative exchange? This collaborative qualitative autoethnography case study explores our experiences as four instructors from the United States and Hong Kong, reflecting our experiences as they relate to teacher capacity building in transnational virtual exchange. The data suggests that previously lived international experiences assisted the instructors in capacity building within a virtual exchange and brought into question the role of cultural humility.

Learning Health Systems (LHSs) seek continuous improvement through the translation and integration of internally and externally generated knowledge across stakeholders within and external to the organization, yet current approaches are primarily described from the healthcare delivery perspective, leaving teaching and research responsibilities underexposed. Academic medical centers offer a unique perspective on LHSs because their mission includes teaching, research, and healthcare. This introduces an opportunity to enact, educate, and study processes and outcomes of LHSs within a single system. Little information is available to describe these processes and outcomes, resulting in a knowledge gap regarding the role of education and research in the quality improvement cycles and learning of LHSs. To close this knowledge gap,

Purpose This pilot study investigated the level of cognition that physician assistant (PA) students achieved through adoption of an innovative blended learning model that connects the classroom, clinicians, and community clinics through electronic-learning (e-learning) technologies (C4Tech) used in a PA course. This education intervention aimed to facilitate authentic learning collaborations between PA students and practicing clinicians that would result in higher-order cognition related to the manifestations of social determinants of health and health disparities. Methods A case study approach was adopted to assess levels of cognition and changes in those levels resulting from application of an innovative blended learning model. Content analysis using Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive domains facilitated determination levels of cognition and changes in those levels. The sample of 8 groups comprised 70 PA students and 8 clinical instructors from community clinics with underrepresented patient populations. Results Analysis of 2 course assignments revealed that application of the C4Tech model yields high levels of cognition. By the course's end, all 8 groups achieved at least the “evaluate” level of cognition and half of the groups achieved the highest level of cognition, the “create” level. A wide variation in the level of cognition was demonstrated between the first and second assignments in each group and among groups. Conclusion Our findings suggest that e-learning technologies can be effective in blending classrooms and work environments for authentic and collaborative learning. Adoption of the C4Tech model yielded higher-order cognition related to course content.

Bridging the Gap studio brings US graduate students together with Iraqi graduate students for a collaborative urban design studio focusing on urban redevelopment proposals for selected commercial districts in the two capital cities of Washington DC and Baghdad. Each group serves as information sources, eyes-on-the-ground, cultural informants, fact-checkers, and design critics for their overseas counter-parts. We communicate through multiple digital means. The theoretical basis of the studio draws upon multiple disciplines. Initial motivation was citizen diplomacy, an international relations concept that engages private citizens in “individual endeavors that serve their own interests and diplomacy which includes a framework for cooperation be-tween countries.” 1 A key theoretical underpinning of the studio is globalization, cutting across multiple disciplines, spanning practice and academia. 2 Initial support came from a multi-national design firm that viewed the studio as a vehicle for inculcating competencies of global practice. Interaction with the firm’s architects, including a studio design competition bringing US and Iraqi students to the Washington DC office for internships, shows students how practitioners put those cultural understandings and skills into action. Globalization has also influenced the discipline of geography, leading to innovations in the field of comparative urbanism3 4 to work “across diverse human experiences.” Bridging the Gap Studio produces studies in comparative urbanism as the US and Iraqi students discover both similarity and difference in their focus districts. The pedagogical method draws upon situated learning theory, positing that learning should take place in authentic practice settings and within social communities.5 While one could argue that every architectural design studio exemplifies situated learning, Bridging the Gap studio offers a particularly robust example, creating a setting that mimics global practice and a social community that includes inhabitants of the urban places under study.

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