A Case Study of International Cooperative Learning Between American and Chinese Students

International Cooperative Learning (ICL) possesses a big potential in becoming a good solution to higher education’s challenge of “internationalization.” To explore how ICL should be designed, implemented and what challenges and barriers an ICL course may encounter, the researchers from SYSU, Guangzhou, China and IU, Indianapolis, USA researched ICL by incorporating it into the course of ‘Global Tourism Geography’ and bringing their students together into the same distance-learning ‘classroom’. Such a study is needed for the reason that ICL lacks clear conception and practical operationalization, although it possesses great potentials to be an important solution to challenges caused by “internationalization” of higher education (Sungpikul, 2009; Zhang et al., 2010). Due to insufficient academic studies, up till now, little is known about what this learning approach actually means and how it can be successfully implemented.