The Structure and Genesis of “German and American Politics in Comparative Perspective”

The international “virtual classroom” or “virtual exchange” can be viewed as a subset of the burgeoning field of online learning and web-based courses that have proliferated in recent years.²

The basic idea behind a virtual exchange is that students at a university in the U.S. work on a joint project, or participate in a seminar, or (in our case) be common participants in a class with students at a university abroad. Among the many goals of such virtual exchanges is the development of students' global understanding and cultural empathy, a deepening of the knowledge of other cultures and political systems, and, in general, the cultivation of cross-cultural skills. Our virtual exchange grew out of the recognition of two facts about our classes. First, we recognized that many of our students lacked extensive direct experience with foreign cultures and thus had only a superficial knowledge about other countries and political systems outside of their own. Second, we noted that even within the group of students who had a satisfactory knowledge base of the world and an interest in foreign cultures, we often struggled to make the material come alive and relevant, since most of our students had little opportunity for a direct foreign experience that allowed them to “step inside” another culture. One of the universities at which we teach, the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, has about 5,000 students, more than 90% of whom come from southeast Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Many of the students at UW-Parkside are the first in their family to have gone to college, and most of these students have had little experience of the world outside Wisconsin, let alone outside the U.S. Additionally, some 80% of UW-Parkside students hold part-time, or even full-time jobs, and many have serious family obligations as well. As a result, very few UW-Parkside students participate in more traditional semester- or year-abroad programs and only a few more participate in short-term study programs. Thus while other schools in the UW system have study abroad participation rates of anywhere from 5–17% of the student body, only about 0.7% of Parkside students (a mere 52 students) participated in any kind of study abroad program in 2004. Despite this fact, there is an appetite for classes dealing with the world outside the U.S., including classes in Comparative Politics.

Our desire to develop a web-based course or virtual exchange was facilitated by a Fulbright Alumni Initiatives Grant we received in the fall of 2001 and a further grant in 2002 from the German Körber Stiftung. The Alumni Initiatives Grant is designed to sustain relationships Fulbright grantees have made with their host institutions by funding ongoing activities that foster continued relationships between the two.

During the spring and summer of 2002, we set about constructing an online course, “German and American Politics in Comparative Perspective,” which would link students in a political science seminar class taught at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster to a political science seminar class taught at UW-Parkside. We first offered it in the fall of 2002 and had four goals for the course. First and most generally, we wanted to increase students' knowledge (and this was especially true for the American students) of the other country's political system and political culture. An appreciation of the latter seemed especially important to us. We believe that direct experience of a culture and country is essential in coming to any specific conclusions about a country's political culture. Although our class could not provide students a direct experience of political culture, it could provide an indirect one through contact and communication with students from the other country. Thus we felt as if our class was unique in trying to understand the concept of political culture through scholarly literature, an examination of Alltagsleben (“daily life”) in the two societies, and directly communicated personal experience. Accordingly then, a second and related goal of the class was to provide opportunities for communication and extended contact between students in our two classes that would allow each group of students to experience a foreign culture through our dialogic exchange of ideas. Beyond these more general “empathetic” goals, our third goal was to have students gain a greater knowledge, in a true comparative fashion, of some of the key similarities and differences shaping politics in two liberal democracies. Here we focused on comparative political institutions and political behavior, with the first third of the course (and some of the other parts of the course as well) dealing with these areas. Fourth, and closely related to the third objective, we wanted the students to sharpen their conceptual and methodological skills in comparative political analysis by applying these skills to two specific cases among liberal democracies, the U.S. and Germany. Thus we hoped that our class would increase our students' skills in comparative politics by providing something like a virtual field-work experience.

We organized our course loosely around three themes that attempt to compare the German/European and American political experience, using scholarly literature in these areas to provoke wide-ranging thought and discussion between the two groups of students.

Our themes—Political Culture and the Impact of the Past in Germany and the U.S., Germany and the U.S. in International Politics, and The Politics of Education in Germany and the U.S.—were chosen both for their wide appeal and timeliness as well as for their ability to highlight political-cultural similarities and differences between the two countries. We purposely selected scholarly literature on these themes that would both be controversial and thought-provoking as well as easily comprehensible for the beginning-to-intermediate political science student. Examples of literature from the first theme included seminal articles on the concept of political culture as well as articles on the legacies of slavery for race relations in the U.S. and on the “usable past” in Germany and its role in shaping German identity and foreign policy; examples of literature from the second theme included major foreign policy speeches on the War on Terror by President George W. Bush and German foreign minister Joschka Fischer as well as Robert Kagan's provocative article “Power and Weakness” (2002); examples of literature from the third theme included discussions of the politics of educational reform in Germany and in the U.S. and readings on career options for recent graduates in Germany and the U.S.

We created a course web site with pictures of the participants from the two classes as well as pictures and brief descriptions of the two communities, Münster (Germany) and Racine/Kenosha. The syllabus was posted on the web site, as well as links to useful sources, such as the web sites of local and national newspapers, the German Embassy in the U.S. and the American Embassy in Germany, and the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in the U.S. We expected students from both classes to keep current with some of the central political issues in their own local and national communities, as well as in the other group's local and national community. Finally, the web site included a link to the chatroom and discussion board used for our class discussions, which were accessed through the University of Wisconsin online learning system.³

During the roughly nine-week part of the course in which the German and American semesters overlap, students in both countries were responsible for analyzing assigned readings, posting evaluations/classroom presentations on the web, and engaging in electronic discussion during class time. Since most German students have some facility in English (with many fluent), and since we could presume no knowledge of German on the part of the American students (although some were, in fact, studying German) the language of instruction was English. Each week two to three American students and two to three German students were chosen to post their brief summary, analysis, and reaction to the electronic discussion board. Other students in the class were then expected to post their thoughts on the readings and on the posted papers by classroom presenters. Thus this part of the seminar was conducted in “non-real” (asynchronous) time on an electronic discussion board. This had the advantage of allowing students some reflection time before class discussion. Meanwhile, regular meetings of the class were conducted “face-to-face” in our respective departmental computer labs in “real” or synchronous time—German students in class in the afternoon, Americans in the morning—using the analyses and reactions posted on the discussion board as a jumping-off point for our discussions in the classroom. The instructors provided the general structure and organization of each class period but during real-time class discussions attempted to act more as discussion leaders for the students' online exchange by posing questions and themes from the readings and discussion board we thought pertinent. At the conclusion of each class, we worked with the students to identify the common ideas or thematic patterns which had emerged from our real-time discussion. We also appointed several students to reflect upon and summarize our real-time discussion and to post these thoughts to the discussion board so that the entire class could reflect upon the previous real-time class meeting.

Two other features of the class should be noted. First, as should be clear from our brief exposition above, our class was not a “pure” but rather a “hybrid” online course in two senses—through its mix of physical class meetings and online discussion and through its decentralized nature. Although both classes read from the same literature and did the same kind of online assignments, our classes were autonomous, i.e., each instructor developed their own classroom assessment tools consistent with the somewhat different higher education culture of our two countries. Thus, for example, although research papers were assigned to each of our classes, each instructor independently discussed paper topics, set paper requirements, and assessed their own group of students. Nevertheless, both groups of students were instructed to choose a topic that would be comparative in nature, focusing on either institutions, political culture, or political behavior in the two countries. Consistent with our goal to facilitate greater interaction and understanding among the two groups of students, we encouraged the creation of an “expertise and interest board,” where students from each class would discuss their particular interest and expertise in their own country that students from the other group could then draw on in writing the research paper. Thus, for example, two students who were interested in looking at comparative legal systems in the U.S. and Germany developed contacts outside of class (through both email and the discussion board) where they exchanged expertise on their respective legal systems, and advised each other on aspects of their research papers. Indeed, beyond expertise per se, we encouraged the students to exchange their personal email addresses and/or use the discussion board outside of class to either continue discussions begun during our real-time chats or simply to exchange ideas and get to know each other better. Consistent with this idea, the second additional feature we should mention here—and one we hope to develop further—was a video/webcam hook-up for some class meetings. Although the technology here remains daunting and often frustratingly primitive (see our discussion of this below), we felt it was important that the students put a face to the disembodied voice/print of the students with whom they were engaged in discussion.

Challenges of the Course and Student Feedback

Although we would like to report that our class was an unqualified success without any significant problems, we did encounter some challenges—some relatively trivial, others more substantial. To begin with, the U.S. and German university academic semesters do not match up. Only the fall semester could really work for this project, and even then the American and German semesters could not be completely coordinated. However, we quickly turned a necessity into a virtue, realizing that American students in particular, with a much smaller knowledge base about Germany than German students have about the U.S., could use the time in September before German university began to review (or introduce, as the case might be) aspects of German political history, political culture, and political institutions before both classes would meet online in October.

When we began our real-time online discussions more serious challenges emerged, many of which were connected to the link between the technology used for the course and the expectations and learning goals we had set. There were considerable difficulties in constructing and maintaining a course web site and becoming familiar with the technology involved in the real-time chats, discussion board, and video conference. For example, although the development of Internet technology has made remarkable progress in recent years, we faced daunting challenges when implementing a web-based video conference during the semester. It must be emphasized that video conferences can (and, we think, should) become an additional component of teaching and learning. But to date, video conference technology remains limited. The data traffic of a video conference is extremely high compared with chatting via the Internet or using a discussion board. Due to limited and varying Internet bandwidth, the quality of sound and video during Internet conferences is lower than we would have hoped. Consequently, we used a video conference only in our last class session. On the basis of our experience with the chat and discussion board (see extended discussion below) we separated the class into different teams and gave them the chance to discuss selected topics with a student group abroad. At the beginning, the students were very shy and felt awkward communicating in front of a camera but warmed up considerably during the video conference. Unfortunately, the discussion was interrupted several times because of reduced sound quality and the discussion never quite reached the substantial level for which we had hoped. Yet despite the technical problems, the students were very enthusiastic about the opportunity to communicate with their peers in this much more personal and interactive way. They appreciated having the opportunity to finally “meet” their counterparts, and some even made plans for an actual visit, which we know in one case occurred several months after the conclusion of the class.

More pedagogically challenging was a problem (or more correctly, a series of problems) between the “form” used for real-time class discussions (the chat room) and the “content” of these discussions that emerged soon after our first class meeting. Chat rooms, by their very nature, privilege brief comments and brief exchanges of ideas over longer ones. This fact meant that our chats would often move quite quickly, posing real difficulties for the German students who, although comfortable in English, nevertheless showed more limitations with these quick exchanges than did the native English-speaking American students. This also meant that a certain disjointedness crept into our real-time chats, something noted by many students in post-class evaluations. Indeed, contrary to our expectations (and fears) that online discussion would be halting, slow, and uncomfortably quiet—a problem all of us occasionally face in a traditional classroom—our electronic discussions tended to move much too quickly. Moreover, and perhaps because these exchanges were fast-paced and brief, discussions could become quite superficial. At best, this meant a regrettable loss of substance in the chats; at worst, it meant that certain student exchanges had a “political talk-show” character (in the worst sense) with talkative or (most especially) politically opinionated students dominating. In short, real-time chats often exacerbated problems all too often found in the classroom—the dominating, politically opinionated student, the lack of real reflection by some students, the tendency in open discussion to get off track from the main arguments, etc.

Our attempts to ameliorate these problems have evolved. First of all, just as there is a certain art to guiding discussion in the real classroom, so too, we realized, there is an art to guiding an electronic one. Above all, the key to guiding discussions lies in moving deftly between two goals in tension with each other: providing students a great deal of freedom to develop their ideas and arguments, and keeping students focused on what the instructor believes are the central issues and ideas at stake. Tension between these two goals is magnified, as it were, through the medium of the chat room. During class sessions we frequently have to steer discussion back to the main points, and in certain cases have addressed our respective classes directly to get them back on track. We also try to pose questions that would require more substantive and sustained answers, and asked particular students in the class to respond to a specific question before any other student can continue with the chat. Moreover, we often have been forced to limit discussion to small sub-groups within each larger group of students, asking the other students in the classroom to refrain from the chat for a brief time period. It is clear to us now that in the future we will need to further sub-divide the two groups, for just as small groups can be more effective in promoting learning and intelligent discussion in the real classroom, so also we believe that having “sub-chatrooms” may be a more effective way of achieving the learning goals of our electronic classroom. Finally, we believe that in future iterations of the class a better ratio of the discussion-board-to-chatroom mix will be essential. Our experience has been that, despite challenges here, discussion boards provide more sustained and substantial student reflection and discussion. A drawback of the discussion board, however, is a loss of spontaneity and of a sense of a real exchange of views characteristic of conversations. Thus, we believe, any electronic classroom needs to include both, with the important caveat that the mix of these two forms of electronic exchange must be carefully evaluated in consideration of the learning objectives of each class meeting.

Despite these hurdles, student response to the class has been overwhelmingly positive. Based on both teaching evaluations as well as videotaped focus groups, we can say that students have found this to be a very enriching experience. Our class received very high aggregate evaluation scores from students and, indeed, several noted that this was one of the best classes they had ever taken. In addition, we noticed that students who normally did not take part in discussions during the first, non-online part of the course became very active during our virtual exchanges, using the chats and discussion boards for substantive discussion and active learning. Thus, in at least a few cases the nature of our class helped to ameliorate the problem of the “shy learner.” Furthermore, the majority of our students also demonstrated a great increase in their knowledge of the other country. After our virtual exchanges and related discussions about political culture in our respective countries, quite a few students suggested that they had acquired a better understanding of political opinions found among the other group of students. Despite a few students' continued resistance, our strong sense is that students generally developed a more empathetic understanding of the dominant views of the other group of students. Thus, for the large majority of students, cross-cultural knowledge and skills as well as cross-cultural understanding and empathy increased markedly as a result of the course.