![Thirteen California community college students between the ages of 19 and 49 spent two weeks in China at the end of the capstone course that was taught simultaneously to them and to Chinese students from SIP Institute of Services Outsourcing in Suzhou, China, using remote and translation technologies.](local/data/caches/images/scaled/img_00018321_300x300.jpg)
The Mid-Pacific Information and Communication Technologies (MPICT) Center's three international pilot projects have yielded positive results for students and faculty. While study-abroad programs are common for liberal arts students, MPICT's multiple international experiences are rare for technology students.
Each of MPICT's pilot projects utilized Cisco's Network Academy curriculum because it is an industry standard taught uniformly around the world. For the two most recent experiments, with a school in France in 2011 and a school in China in 2012, MPICT's faculty partners developed a problem-based scenario that gave students roles in a fictitious company that was merging international units with incompatible network systems. The mixed teams of American and international students had to integrate the systems.
"We wanted them to get the experience of doing the project, doing an international project using the tools they were learning, modern tools to collaborate across the ocean. A lot of work in our field is performed this way," said Pierre Thiry, MPICT principal investigator.