Gazelle International Social Impact Fellowship

Fellowship Description

We aim to empower "the Gazelles," the campus innovators ready to bend the cost curve of internationalization by harnessing the creative potential of curriculum and faculty jointly with global partners. Our focus is on campuses with limited or untapped international and global resources such as community colleges, technical institutes, historically black, indigenous or Hispanic campuses.

Our main vehicle to enable this transformation is virtual exchange. Faculty in two different countries connect their classrooms enabling students to use technology, teamwork, and cross-cultural skills to produce a final collaborative cross-national project. With our turnkey virtual exchange system “CLICK“ - Collaborative Learning for International Capabilities and Knowledge - collaborating campus partners deploy our tested action framework of training, wraparound support and assessment to move from zero to success with virtual exchange in as little as one year. Our recent research article discusses how assessment bolsters our training and campus’ overall results in scaling and sustaining the program.

We would especially value social impact fellows working on two strategic challenges:

Shifting our service model from business-to-client to business-to-business, upscaling from individual and small group teacher training to longer-term campus partnerships.
Re-positioning our brand of virtual exchange to thrive in a fraught higher education market, especially in the US community college sector, while demonstrating our value proposition compared with a growing array of “virtual” international education offerings along with growing numbers of campus-hubs offering their own start-up, consulting services for CLICK-like “virtual exchange.”

Based on the interests and goals of the Fellow, Social Impact Fellows at Gazelle will contribute to one or more of the following areas:

Strategic Planning & Operations: Implementing Market Research
Communications
Grants and Funding Models
Data Analysis and Data Visualization
Assessment

Your Host

Gazelle International a six-year-old non-profit organization, began from the premise that the world is undergoing tectonic shifts with globalization and technology and higher education matters in shaping this global dynamic. Our aspiration is to expand access to high quality international education to enable all graduates to thrive as they generate our mutual futures.

SIF Mentor

Nancy Ruther

Principal and Founder, Gazelle International

Website

https://www.gazelle-international.org/

Drawing on her experience managing and growing Yale University’s Macmillan Center through faculty-led internationalization that included an outreach program K-16 educational community regionally, Nancy spearheaded Gazelle International’s first major project working with the Community Colleges of Connecticut (CCC). She advised them as they developed their first-ever internationalization strategy and they deployed the CLICK- virtual exchange turnkey system, CLICK = Collaborative Learning for International Capabilities and Knowledge. Nancy brings this same commitment to high-quality education to Gazelle International as she works with faculty to help them expand their engagement in the world and share it with their students.