Classroom beyond Borders is an initiative made voluntarily by some professors in different universities. The initiative aims at sharing knowledge and learning experiences among students and professors from different parts of the world. The meeting was attended by professors from An-Najah University, the University of South Africa (UNISA), Ithaca College, NY and Covenant University in Nigeria.
The idea of Classroom beyond Borders is an attempt to achieve learning excellence. It encourages students to initiate concepts for discussion, share what they learn with others, compare and contrast learning concepts with students from different backgrounds and assess what they know and learn by looking at the performance of other students.
Learning becomes learner-centered and the role of the teacher becomes more limited to moderating activities in a social constructivist way.
Good education is that which prepares students to be citizens of the world and not citizens of a limited physical and imaginative geography. Being a citizen of the world does not mean that one ignores his/her culture and national aspiration; it means preparing students to make their private and local experience an international one, crossing boundaries and learning from other experiences in different cultures, being able to compete in the job market internationally, learning to appreciate cultural differences and to relate to people regardless of how different they seem to be from us, finding common grounds for advocating tolerance, mutual understanding, and peace. It also means refusing injustice committed against the poor, the marginalized and the helpless.
The possibilities of sharing information are facilitated by the easy accessibility of information through the different means of communication. Today, many universities, including our own, have most up-to-date labs and other e-learning facilities. We are invited to use them at the utmost capacity before they become obsolete.
Participants at the end of the summer institute made recommendations and plans for future activities among the participating institutions .While the current networking activities are limited to the humanities, participants exchanged ideas about expanding participation to include the sciences, engineering, agriculture and medicine and ways of inviting new fields of specialization.