DOES INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN A GLOBAL CLASSROOM PROMOTE LEARNING?

At the INTED 2016, the main author presented a paper about a higher education global classroom initiative via the Blackboard Learn platform hosted by Drexel University, a private research institution in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The global classroom was defined as distance education courses from any discipline that incorporate a global dimension into their content and delivery so that students from different world locations complete a project or find solutions to problems by working together and building on each other's ideas. During spring 2017, "Issues in Sustainability," an online, elective distance education course taught to graduate U.S. education students, implemented a global classroom component, a partnership with a group of senior undergraduate engineering students from the University of Montevideo, Uruguay. The course instructors and present authors conducted empirical research to answer the question, "Does interdisciplinarity in an online global classroom promote learning?" If the answer is "yes," "In what ways?" The authors use an Interdisciplinary Problem-based Learning (iPBL) approach to discuss students' final projects and draw conclusions. This is a preliminary analysis intended for the INTED 2018 conference proceedings. Subsequently, a full paper will be submitted to a specialty journal.