Exchange program between SU, Anadolu University to be developed
Syracuse University will welcome international students next year through a new student exchange program.
Representatives from Anadolu University, a multi-campus school in Turkey, visited SU during Spring Break to discuss a partnership between the two universities. Anadolu is known for its distance education programs and student exchange relationships across the globe, according to a March 13 SU News release.
The relationship between SU and Anadolu began through Ozgur Yilmazel, a former School of Information Studies faculty member and current director of information technology for Anadolu.
Soon after Yilmazel began communication between the two institutions, Susan Corieri, assistant dean of enrollment management at the iSchool, and Can Isik, senior associate dean for academic and student affairs for the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science, started coordinating Anadolu’s visit to the SU campus.
The exploratory visit of seven delegates from Anadolu to SU concluded this past week.
In the release, Corieri said the visit was ‘a very successful one, where we discovered many synergies and made plans to work closely to create an innovative collaboration.’
The specific details regarding academic programs, when the exchange will begin and the number of potential students participating are still being negotiated and have not been finalized, Corieri said.
She said the program is not only for students in the iSchool, but also for students throughout the entire university.
One of the major factors SU examined when considering the student exchange program with Anadolu was its immense online population, Corieri said. Approximately 1.3 million Anadolu students worldwide study online, according to the release.
‘This extensive use of their learning management system would result in massive data sets that could be studied to better understand and enhance features of online collaboration,’ Corieri said.
This field of study is of particular interest to the iSchool, which has the program for the Certificate of Advanced Studies in Data Science. This program is one of the first to be implemented in the region and will instruct students on how to analyze, organize, collect, store and share large data sets, according to the iSchool’s website.
Data constantly grows in the modern-day globalized world, and the iSchool aims to graduate students who can analyze huge data sets and make effective decisions for future employers, according to the website. By 2018, it is predicted that 140,000 to 190,000 jobs will be needed in the field, according to the website.
Published on March 20, 2012 at 12:00 pm
Contact Jen: jbundy@syr.edu
