Purpose

The purpose of this program evaluation is to address ethical and mindful exchange in the international higher education field by examining the “Univ 103 Orientation to Living Abroad” seminar, a foundation of LVC’s programming across all academic disciplines. As a field that promotes U.S. outbound education abroad, this work helps evaluate programming and its commitment to ethical and mutually beneficial relationship building with local communities. As a seminar that encourages and fosters direct interaction with the local Vietnamese community, it is essential that UNIV 103 facilitates ethical and mindful engagement in an education abroad context.

Design & Development

I co-created this evaluation plan with a team of two other graduate students participating in the course. Designing and developing this plan required effective communication and collaboration with one another throughout the entire process. In the initial phases of the project, our group established guidelines and boundaries on how to best communicate; we also created a schedule for task deadlines and discussed how tasks would be distributed. We worked collectively in Google Docs to brainstorm topics ideas, and through this collaboration we established the course we wanted to evaluate within the context of Loyola’s Vietnam Center. We had several research documents and outlines that were created throughout the design process that were compiled into a folder on Google Drive. We were able to refer to these documents throughout each stage to build upon our ideas and determine the exact topics we planned to cover in the final version of the program evaluation.

An important element of our design also included contacting and interviewing the LVC UNIV 103 course instructor, Bryan Conover, based in Vietnam to gain insight from an employee that directly interacts with LVC students and develops UNIV 103 content. Due to my past role in the Office of International Programs at LUC, I had contacts that could help facilitate a meeting with him. For this reason, our group determined it was best that I conduct this interview. After the interview was conducted and the topic content was outlined, I worked on developing my sections of the program evaluation. After we each developed our individual sections, we reviewed and edited the document several times before it was submitted. The ELPS 431 instructor, Blanca Torres-Olave, was also instrumental in the editing process as well. Throughout the process, Blanca gave feedback on several stages and versions of the document and helped guide us towards the content and structure that is seen in the final version of the document.