During February and March, over 120 global educators from 11 countries came together to engage in online professional development for the BRIDGE Program, supported by the Stevens Initiative. During the online course, participants collaborated with others educators from the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States.  Through this cross-cultural communication, teachers learned how to integrate global projects into their curriculum, shared knowledge and resources, and prepared their students for the next phase of the BRIDGE Program, the Project Exchanges.

“There is no doubt that global collaboration is so important in today’s world. In fact, the concept imposes itself in an era of many challenges that face people and communities around the globe. These challenges concern environment, social, economic, political and other different issues, and I think no community could be free of them, but thanks to modern technology that could facilitate communication and information sharing, global collaboration has become a necessity; people can collaborate between each other to overcome those mentioned challenges and share different ways to find solutions to certain problems.” said Redouane Amezoirou, an online course participant from Morocco.

The next step for Redouane, and the other BRIDGE educators, is to connect their students through asynchronous project exchanges that will culminate in videoconference connections and community exhibitions.