Mirror Classes – Rizoma:: A Strategy for Curriculum Internationalization
Virtual learning and practice communities are not new. Decades of implementation and development demonstrate their strength for collaborative work, the ability to generate knowledge as “everyone contributes”—that is, among participants, there exists distributed cognition resulting from embodied knowledge or systematic practice, or both. In the case of higher education, these communities enhance classroom work, with prior interaction on specific aspects between instructors, sharing teaching resources, evaluation strategies, or posing questions that reaffirm or challenge new horizons in the teaching process.
For the past six years, the Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia has implemented virtual learning and practice communities among professors—designed and monitored on the YAMMER platform of Office 365—under the framework of the Superior Agreement 323 of 2017. In these communities, professors discuss and adopt the critical educational model with a competency-based approach, sharing resources and strategies. As an expression of the maturity of the project (beyond its initial scope), its scope of action has been extended, expanding the Rizoma communities to international academic Rizoma communities, supporting the development of mirror classes conducted by professors within the framework of agreements with national or international universities. These communities, in addition to being innovative, now involve students from our institution and international students. But what is the importance of this experience and its dissemination to the academic community? On the one hand, it facilitates curriculum internationalization, as these mirror classes and their virtual learning communities align topics according to a course program—in our case, competency-based—and coordinate with another, reaching agreements that allow for discussion and appropriation of disciplinary knowledge. On the other hand, it contributes to interculturality, as the community promotes open, reciprocal, critical, and self-critical dialogue between cultures. This is possible because, in their design, these communities revolve, for a predetermined period, around a problem question agreed upon by the organizers. That said, we aim to communicate to the academic community the richness of this strategy from its conception, methodology, interaction data, and quality of interaction that we have developed so far.
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