As technology advances, it opens more opportunities to enhance education around the world. Thanks to Michigan State University’s Global Youth Advancement Network, Alliance for African Partnership (AAP) and the Office for Education Abroad, one educator is making the most of it.
Christina Dokter, Ph.D., senior lecturer in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology for the MSU College of Osteopathic Medicine, is one of 14 faculty selected to participate in the second cohort of MSU’s COIL Faculty Fellows Program. (COIL stands for Collaborative Online International Learning.)
The MSU COIL Faculty Fellows Program – Africa strives to make global learning accessible to MSU students and students from other AAP-affiliated universities by strengthening ties between faculty and academic staff and supporting and advancing the broader COIL initiative. In addition, it empowers faculty and academic staff to explore theory and practice through global partnerships that connect to AAP Consortium institutions.
“COIL has already become an enriching experience for my teaching partner and me as our meeting is an answer to prayer for both of us for an outside project,” Dr. Dokter said. “So, this COIL program will help us improve graduate students’ learning across cultures, which is important, as research has become global, multicultural and transdisciplinary. Additionally, our service-oriented mission is beginning through this COIL partnership.”
Team science: the way forward
In spring 2025, Dr. Dokter will work with Ngozi Chioma Okoronkwo, Ph.D., lecturer in the Department of Food Science and Technology and faculty of Agriculture at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. Their project allows students to learn about and experience how scientists can build effective team collaboration in geographically dispersed, multicultural and inter-disciplinary domains.
“Major funders of research, like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, prioritize team science,” Dr. Dokter explained. “Oftentimes, when scientists collaborate across different areas of expertise, they don’t really know how to communicate together. In today’s world, we’re trying to solve sustainability problems, and science is really complicated with inventions like CRISPR, synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. Solving sustainability problems, such as climate change, food shortages, epidemics and economic disparities requires large teams with people from different cultures, continents and disciplines to collaborate.
“The team solution has to be greater than the sum of its parts. But to get there, team members have to know what others on the team know, and they have to imagine, communicate and innovate together to come up with solutions to the world’s problems.”
To help prepare graduate students to work with dynamic science teams across long distances, Dr. Dokter and Dr. Okoronkwo will overlap six weeks of their respective curricula, during which time their students will learn about team science. First, Dr. Dokter will teach the students about core components of team science, including psychological safety, trust, cultural differences and approaches to team learning. Dr. Okoronkwo will then introduce case studies about food biotechnology. The students will work together to share experiences and fill knowledge gaps to create questions about the case studies, using AI tools to help facilitate discussion. Lastly, these questions will be used to record a podcast, which the students can review to reinforce what they learn.
Dr. Dokter says all this work feeds into her ultimate goal: to create a model for team metacognition – where teams can become aware of how they think, learn and process together – to improve outcomes across team-based science.
Inclined to educate online
Online education as a practice is ingrained in Dr. Dokter. Before she became involved in COIL, she taught courses and managed the online master’s degree program in Pharmacology and Toxicology. She also helped create the PharmTox undergraduate minor. In addition, Dr. Dokter supported other professors’ distance learning, addressing online curricula and technology triage.
Her own degree also lends itself to her inclination to educate others. Dr. Dokter earned her Ph.D. from MSU’s HALE Program – Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education – with a specialization in distance education. She also holds a master’s degree in education technology.
“I was meant to teach online,” Dr. Dokter reflected. “I use a lot of my technology skills in my own courses.”
By E. LaClear