Cornell University's Global Seminar 480, a course that connects students in seven countries across 16 time zones, will be given the 2001 Excellence in Distance Education Award by the American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC) March 5 in Arlington, Va.

The ADEC award will be presented at the Council for Agricultural Research Extension and Teaching luncheon at the Doubletree Hotel Crystal City, Arlington, Va. The award ceremony will be at approximately 12:45 p.m.

Cornell's Global Seminar is an international class that allows students to communicate with each other via Internet-, telephone- and satellite-based video. Cornell organizes the class with equal participation from eight other institutions, including Wageningen University and Research Center, the Netherlands; the Open University of the Netherlands; Universidad EARTH, Costa Rica; University Zamorano, Honduras; Uppsala University, Sweden; the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences; the University of Melbourne, Australia; and Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University, India.

Students participate in five case studies during the semester, dividing into international problem-solving groups. During each project, the Cornell students meet with students from other countries by way of Pic-Tel videoconferencing and web streaming for one-way live broadcasts, as well as CU-See-Me for two-way interactive classrooms and Blackboard's CourseInfo service, which creates a course web site.

"It's live, interactive television -- all sites are connected and all students can speak," says H. Dean Sutphin, associate dean of academic programs in Cornell's New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, who created the course. The monitor is split four ways, and each site is rotated into the picture. Through the decision/case-study process, students continue their discussion by way of computer-based connections. Case-study summations are derived from the international discussion.