{"id":56684,"date":"2020-10-16T09:44:21","date_gmt":"2020-10-16T14:44:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/?p=56684"},"modified":"2020-10-16T09:44:23","modified_gmt":"2020-10-16T14:44:23","slug":"fhsu-stays-in-touch-with-international-students-through-summer-virtual-camps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/?p=56684","title":{"rendered":"FHSU stays in touch with international students through summer virtual camps"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By UNIVERSITY RELATIONS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

COVID-19 prevented international students interested in Fort Hays State University from visiting the campus this past summer. But the Office of Global Partnerships (OGP) was diligent about finding a way to still host those students through free virtual camps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Discovering new ways to connect with\ninternational students in their freshman and sophomore years of college was remarkably effective and rewarding during the trying times of the pandemic,\nsaid Haley Williams, special projects coordinator for the OGP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCOVID-19 forced us into a new way of\nthinking,\u201d Williams said. \u201cNow, we have a virtual platform in place, with which\nwe can reach so many more people. We\u2019re making a new path for those\nconnections, refining techniques we will be able to use in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cindy Elliott, assistant vice president\nfor Global Partnerships, came up with the idea of hosting the camps online this\nsummer. By the end of the summer, more than 500 students from four different\ncountries \u2013 Cameroon, China, Turkey and the Bahamas\n\u2013 had registered to \u201ctour\u201d the FHSU campus virtually through scheduled\nWebinars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elliott chose five international partners\nfor Special Projects Coordinator Haley Williams to contact and inquire if they\nwere interested in participating. That list included Sias\nUniversity and Shenyang Normal University, whose partnerships feature\nFHSU faculty teaching on their campuses as students earn degrees from Fort Hays\nState. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Williams\ndrafted a proposal of a virtual summer camp to recruit 60 students to\nparticipate. However, the OGP was soon faced\nwith keeping up with the overwhelming interest in these virtual experiences when\none partner alone recruited 335 participants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To meet the\ndemand, OGP teamed up with International Student Services to recruit a summer\ncamp team of current FHSU students, both domestic and international. This\nprovided the opportunity for potential students to connect with current FHSU\nstudents. This was value added to the virtual camp experience as the\nparticipants often felt more comfortable asking questions to the Fort Hays\nState students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ting Zhou, instructional\ndesigner for the Department of Teaching Innovation and Learning Technologies, worked closely with\nWilliams to develop content and to format the sessions as a Webinar. With so much interest in the Webinars,\nthe OGP extended the original plan for two sessions to five, culminating in a\ntotal of 44 hours of Zoom video\/audio conferencing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe were blown away with the interest\nshown,\u201d Williams said, \u201cStudents would send the link to others they knew, and\nparents would join, too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each session began with a\nwelcome from either FHSU President Dr. Tisa Mason or Provost Dr. Jill\nArensdorf. There were presentations about career readiness, campus safety,\nadapting to American culture and much more. Participants got to meet Hays Mayor\nShaun Musil. Melissa Dixon, executive director of the Hays Convention and\nVisitors Bureau, gave a video presentation of the city of Hays. And Ian\nTrevethan, education and outreach manager at FHSU\u2019s Sternberg Museum of Natural\nHistory, gave a live virtual tour of the facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe feel it was a great success because\nwe were able to have a more interactive event to keep the students engaged,\u201d\nWilliams said. \u201cI think it was a really good example of the caring spirit of\nFort Hays State University, and it was an amazing collaboration of our Hays\ncommunity and university campus departments.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because the Webinars\nincluded students from four different countries, Williams said it created a\ncultural exchange for all the participants.\n\n\u201cWe learned so much\nalong with the students,\u201d Williams said. \u201cThe great thing in going online is that we were able\nto get in the homes of these students and their parents and connect with them\nin a more personal way. I think we were very successful in using these Webinar\nsessions as a vehicle to let them know how much we care about them and how much\nwe look forward to one day welcoming them to FHSU.\u201d\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By UNIVERSITY RELATIONS COVID-19 prevented international students interested in Fort Hays State University from visiting the campus this past summer. But the Office of Global… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56685,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11722],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-releases"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tigermedianet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/OGP20virtual20summer20camps.jpeg?fit=1901%2C819&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56684"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56686,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56684\/revisions\/56686"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/56685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}