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A creative and flexible online version of the master programs, spread over more than one year (=the current full-time live masters in Antwerp) and adequately organised to enable participation of students while to continue working, would have a strong demand and willingness to pay in several regions. Students would avoid the cost of travel, board and a year of lost salary. A successful version of online masters could be transformed in a sustainable and significant source of finance within the  broader collaboration effort, both for the partner institutions, academics involved and IOB. It will require a careful joint analysis and reflection to design adequate benefit sharing arrangements.

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We assume that students will be interested to earn the IOB diploma with the online master, and we assume that it will be possible to award the IOB diploma (if quality standards that currently apply at IOB are guaranteed). This is not yet possible now, regulations require students to inscribe themselves in person in Antwerp, but with the digital mind shift that should become possible. The ideal will be to combine this IOB degree with a local degree (for the program offered from the regional hubs). It is not clear, however, whether and how this could become possible. If it is not possible, we need to investigate if we can just offer a master program in ‘national markets’ from the IOB.

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Given the already exaggerated workload it is not possible for the IOB staff to take the full responsibility for an online version of the master programs (additional to the programs in Antwerp), neither would that be in line with our objectives to ‘truly globalize’ our masters. Can we find sufficient interest and qualified academics with or close to our partner institutions to join in the collaborative teaching effort?

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A collaborative online/blended version of the master program should be made compatible with the original idea of joint locally embedded, equivalent versions of the IOB master. The blended aspect of the master could imply some ‘live’ presence in hubs in our partner countries (e.g. for some specific courses, and certainly for the dissertation research, research internships). The locally embedded hubs could/should be a part of the broader integrated mutually beneficial cooperation strategy including joint research/outreach and mutual individual and institutional capacity building and learning through exchange. An adequate combination of local embeddedness and focus on the issues of the region and global outreach and interaction would generate significant interest from students.

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The digital form clearly enhances the possibility for active global teaching contributions and international exchange (of lecturers and among students) without the need for international travel (also a climate advantage!) and long stays abroad. This has been taking place recently in terms of teaching contributions to the masters in Antwerp, but could be reinforced in an collaborative online version of the master programs. It is also clearly a newly emerging opportunity which we should not miss.

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In a digital version of our masters, it would be difficult to recreate our ‘international classroom’, i.e. the current IOB-in-Antwerp experience of a year of intense interaction and cooperation with students from ‘all over the world’ (> 30 different nationalities). Could digital forms compensate for this?

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Lessons learned from the Nicaragua experience

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Lessons learned from the Nicaragua experience

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Together with the Task Force (6 academics from the Central American region), we have developed a local research course, including an equivalent, ‘Nicaraguan version’ of the Local Institutions and Poverty Reduction (LIPR) Module of our three master programs. In April 2020, eight students from Central America were ready to start the pilot version of this course module, and two students from the masters in Antwerp were ready to fly out to Nicaragua, when the corona-crisis broke lose, and everything had to be cancelled. Then, it was decided to rework the program and offer the research course (incl. the LIPR module) in an online/blended form. This program managed to attract 17 students from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and a Nicaraguan in France. By now, we have offered the Theories and Concepts and 4 locally adapted sub-units of the LIPR course, and the students are terminating their End of Module papers (mid July). They will then start with a research paper, supervised by the same team. (An envisaged two weeks applied research course in the filed unfortunately had to be cancelled again due to the surge in corona and politically tense situation.)

There are some preliminary lessons learned from this pilot experience:

-        The combination of ‘locally relevant, focused topics’ and ‘global perspectives from elsewhere’ was very much appreciated, and the perspective of having students and lecturers from other parts of the world (than Central America and Belgium) was considered to be very attractive.

-        The experience with the digital teaching tools was quite positive; active interaction was possible.. although challenges remain

-        The timing of the course was inadequate, since it was modelled on the timing Antwerp following the original idea of offering an equivalent program that students from Antwerp might also follow. Even when it was announced in advance that the program required full-time presence, most students were actually combining it with work. This obliged us to adapt the original timing… and the lesson learned that the program should explicitly target those people that continue working (often in organisations that are interested in the theoretical-conceptual and methodological contributions of the course).

-        There was a short social media campaign, but most students were led to the program through the network of Nitlapan and Task Force members in the region as well as the alumni of IOB.

-        A sufficient command of English is not a problem at all for our Central American target group (there were doubts about this)

Are there other experiences in the network? Reaction to these lessons? Other ideas?

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-	Indeed agree with this--- this should start by exploring how the different actors participating in this process envision the word collaboration (including IOB but not reduced to its conception) , their different needs and desires, their different histories and present conditions. An assessment of all that, done by the partners themselves, could lead to the proposition of different “tracts” of learning and exchange and different “scales” or kinds of programs.    

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-	Indeed agree with this--- this should start by exploring how the different actors participating in this process envision the word collaboration (including IOB but not reduced to its conception) , their different needs and desires, their different histories and present conditions. An assessment of all that, done by the partners themselves, could lead to the proposition of different “tracts” of learning and exchange and different “scales” or kinds of programs.    

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-	Are joint diplomas a possibility in partner organizations? Can all of them issue diplomas? 

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-	Are joint diplomas a possibility in partner organizations? Can all of them issue diplomas? 

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-	It strikes me that we have to become “truly global” when we have been truly and sadly global for many centuries now and in more intense ways in the last decades—so, instead of referring to this program as a “globalized-network version”, I think of it  as a “knowledge sharing network” that is able to decenter itself, to reconfigure itself.  -	What is meant by qualitatively equivalent versions? Who  defines what quality is and what becomes equivalent? What is lost here is how hard it is for partners to meet those criteria and, if they are able to meet them, how difficult it is to sustain them (having professors with PhD, having fully bilingual programs, having students who can dedicate 100% of their time to their education and expecting that they will pay their tuitions or part of them).  That is why I think it is important to have different “scales” or kinds of programs for the different needs and desires of partners and of IOB. This would entail  different “tracks of training” not only in terms of the thematic of exchange (learning) but also on the methodology, the expectations linked to quality and results, the payment of not of those programs and their purpose.   Perhaps some of those programs will be paid locally and generate resources to the partners but not to IOB while others can generate resources to IOB and others might not generate income. They would have different characteristics and could be in some ways interconnected but not necessarily. 

# data[].attributes.subject
-	It strikes me that we have to become “truly global” when we have been truly and sadly global for many centuries now and in more intense ways in the last decades—so, instead of referring to this program as a “globalized-network version”, I think of it  as a “knowledge sharing network” that is able to decenter itself, to reconfigure itself.  -	What is meant by qualitatively equivalent versions? Who  defines what quality is and what becomes equivalent? What is lost here is how hard it is for partners to meet those criteria and, if they are able to meet them, how difficult it is to sustain them (having professors with PhD, having fully bilingual programs, having students who can dedicate 100% of their time to their education and expecting that they will pay their tuitions or part of them).  That is why I think it is important to have different “scales” or kinds of programs for the different needs and desires of partners and of IOB. This would entail  different “tracks of training” not only in terms of the thematic of exchange (learning) but also on the methodology, the expectations linked to quality and results, the payment of not of those programs and their purpose.   Perhaps some of those programs will be paid locally and generate resources to the partners but not to IOB while others can generate resources to IOB and others might not generate income. They would have different characteristics and could be in some ways interconnected but not necessarily. 