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This spring, MPICT conducted an exciting pilot project,
funded by the National Science Foundation, which created an
international ICT capstone course for students from four
community colleges in the MPICT region and the Centre des
Formations Industrielles (CFI) in Paris, France, which has a
“Digital Sister City” relationship with San Francisco, CA,
where MPICT’s office is located.
International collaboration is increasingly common in ICT
workforce roles. This experience explored how we might
better integrate international experiences into community
college ICT education.
Community College Student Photo From Paris
For this project, 24 American students were recruited from
Santa Rosa Junior College, Ohlone College and City College
of San Francisco in California and Truckee Meadows Community
College in Nevada, and 18 French students were recruited
from CFI in France.
The project was based on Cisco Networking Academy
curriculum, because that is common around the world, and it
provided a common background on which to build experiences.
Students were required to be enrolled in or have completed
CCNA4: Accessing the WAN.
Ohlone College offered the specially created course, taught
by Michael McKeever from Santa Rosa JC and Danijela Bedic
from Ohlone, which was designed as a real world scenario.
Students were asked to assume they worked for previously
separate wine companies in the U.S. and France, which had
recently merged. It was their job to work together to
integrate their different network systems into a functional
new system. This kind of situation is now common in real
world ICT operations.
Classes were delivered through CCCConfer, a California
Community College version of the Elluminate (now Blackboard
Collaborate) platform. That allowed everyone to interact in
real time with teachers and each other to learn the scenario
and relevant background. With the time difference, the
course was delivered simultaneously at 8am Pacific Time and
5pm Paris time. Students who could not be online in the
moment could later review recorded archives of the 8
sessions.
Students were grouped in 6 teams, each made up of 4 American
students and 3 French students from the CFI. Teams then
tasked to work together to analyze the situation and come up
with viable solutions. They had to discover and manage time
and cultural differences and find ways to work together
remotely. Cisco Packet Tracer enhanced with its Multi-User
capability was used for the network environment.
Student Work Session in Paris
Thirteen of the American students were selected to travel to
France to complete their project face-to-face with their
French counterparts and present their solutions to Cisco
executives and college professors. A Cisco hosted
Telepresence session engaged U.S. students not able to
travel to Paris.
CFI students alternate 2 weeks in the classroom and two
weeks with ICT employers. Most gain full employment at the
completion of their two-year program. American students
visited four work sites: (1) the data center of Paris City
Hall; (2) a switching center of France Telecom (Orange); (3)
the IT center of the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry;
and (4) the sophisticated network infrastructure of the
Société Générale, one of the oldest and largest European
financial services companies.
On the last day of the visit, the American team invited
their French hosts to a goodbye luncheon.
Many of the success elements of this project are
reproducible to enrich other ICT educational experiences:
building relationships between programs at different schools
anywhere, finding common backgrounds on which to build
experiences, engaging students with real world scenarios,
using effective collaboration tools, engaging business
partners, integrating real cultural experiences and helping
everyone understand the real world relevance.
Back to Q2 2011
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