During this virtual exchange project, graduate students from UF and undergraduate students from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia worked together to identify and explore global health challenges in their partners’ country.

Because the size of this UF course is so large, Professor Mocko offers her students a choice of four different international activities. Her students may choose to participate in any one of the four projects described below, which are each carried out with a different international partner and all happen within the same semester.

Project 1: Data Ethics-This project involves a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous activities, in which students read about data ethics and then defend their opinions on whether or not data was used ethically in a specific case.

This VE project will be a collaboration between undergraduate students at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia, and Masters students at University of Florida. The course will join over a period of approximately six weeks in which students will build upon their shooting and editing skills and expand their theoretical foundations in the practice of storytelling in both fiction and non-fiction genres.

The students were separated into groups, consisting of students from each university where students had to go out on their own campus and select an issue related to solid waste management that could be improved through behavior change. The students then presented this information to their groups and then the smaller groups of students representing each campus created a plan to improve these behaviors for the other university campus. The groups met synchronously through Zoom and gave weekly asynchronous video meeting reflections through the platform Flipgrid.