OSUN Receives IIE Andrew Heiskell Award for Innovation in International Education
The OSUN Courses program, led by Bard College, has re-envisioned international education as a full curriculum of regular undergraduate courses taught by faculty around the world to students across a broad range of geographies and backgrounds.
The OSUN Courses program, led by Bard College, has re-envisioned international education as a full curriculum of regular undergraduate courses taught by faculty around the world to students across a broad range of geographies and backgrounds. Courses are co-designed and taught simultaneously across partner institutions. Each semester, more than 3,300 students across 23 partner institutions enroll in 60+ courses taught by over 160 faculty. About half of the enrollments consist of displaced students.
An OSUN classroom may bring together students from Afghanistan, Austria, Bangladesh, Kyrgyzstan, Haiti, Myanmar, and the United States and may include students in refugee camps in Kenya. Students engage with a wide range of perspectives and thus increase their global learning and intercultural competence.
Over 85% of students report that they learned more in their OSUN course than they would have if there were only students from their home campus. More than 90% would recommend OSUN courses to a friend. These courses promote global learning among students who have no opportunity for study abroad and enable students to pursue international education throughout their four years of undergraduate study.
OSUN courses make a distinctively valuable contribution to higher education because they are deliberately designed to foster exchanges of perspectives among students around the world. They empower students to learn across divides—to think about issues from different cultural or geographic perspectives, engage with concepts they disagree with, and address differences constructively.
The success of the OSUN Courses program was made possible by the deep institutional partnerships forged when the network began and by the generous support of the Open Society Foundations. These partnerships were built on common values and on shared institutional commitments to learn from each other, build programs together, and collaboratively explore innovative solutions to the fundamental challenges of our time. Network partners open their own institution’s courses to students across the network, embed teaching and curricular collaborations in their respective institutions, and advance cross-institutional integration of teaching and curriculum development.
Post Date: 05-27-2025