The Intercultural Open University Foundation, a unique charitable educational foundation established in 1981, is expanding this Fall to include post-doctoral courses in social change. The specialized academic programs of the IOU Foundation are affordable and scholarships are available. The IOU Foundation’s continued goal is to make education collaborative, learner-centered, and accessible to underserved populations.
The Foundation has created a learning environment where serious minded and highly motivated learners can study at a distance under personalized mentored guidance to achieve social change in world communities.
The IOU Foundation is implementing its new post-doctoral programs in social change with expert faculty members from many nations around the globe. It will be a one year course of individualized study and graduates will participate in an annual conference on social change.
Selected learners in this new program will enhance their career track while tackling serious issues including peace, ecology, human rights, and pedagogy itself. The Foundation’s unique structure offers learners the opportunity to delve into serious subject matters that might not be available elsewhere.
The IOU Foundation faculty is comprised of a group of dedicated educators who volunteer their knowledge, time and expertise to benefit future generations by mentoring very select learners who choose to be involved in working for global social change. Faculty members each bring over 25 years of experience with social change.
The Intercultural Open UniversityFoundation
Established in 1981,the Intercultural Open University Foundation (IOU) isa unique foundation that engages some of the finest minds in theirfields of expertise to provide a personalized, mentored, on-line educational experience for graduate learnersanywhere in the world. The Foundation was created as a vehicle for social change that would enable learners todevelop a tailor-made course of study with a global perspective. IOU isgrounded in the belief that education and researchare key elements in resolving pressing global problems. Learners are encouraged to develop programs focusing on social relevance and the ways in which the world’s peoples, with their multiple and conflicting interests, can live together peacefully and justly. The Foundation aspires to provide the highest quality education to diverse adult populationsand to actively reach those underserved by highereducation, including learners from developing countries.
Unlike most institutions with a top-down management style, the Foundation emphasizes a collaborative approach to management and learning. The faculty and staff are dedicated to providing an intellectual setting in which disciplinary boundaries are easily crossed. The IOU Foundation is based on an educational philosophy to offer the finest self-directed, borders-free program for truly engaging learners in the learning process.
Intercultural OpenUniversity Foundation’s volunteer faculty members, all of whom hold doctorates from esteemed universities,each have more than 25 years of experience in distance education and inlearner-centered adult pedagogy. Aspioneers in non-traditional education, the staff and faculty of IOU areconstantly committed to putting the needs of learners first. With the freedom to engage graduate level learners anywhere on the globe, IOU encourages individual opportunity; its goal is to enhance learner competence and performance via this self-directed/mentored learning experience.
The individualized graduate programs require that the adult learners assume a great deal ofresponsibility for their own learning process. Programs of study are not course based. In collaboration with faculty mentors and a specified means of scholarly evaluation, each learner creates an individualized curriculum relevant to his or her chosen specializations. With mentor supervision,learners identify a research area and develop the necessary skills needed tocarry out their research programs of study. They investigate important practical and socially relevant problems,disseminate their research results to varied audiences, and work with practitioners to implement and test their research findings.
The Foundation makes it possible for learners to choose a specific area of study that might not beavailable at other institutions or that might not be offered at a convenient time or place. The Foundation allows for interdisciplinary studies, such as combining mentoring studies and organization management for a specialty in Mentorship Management.
The outstanding volunteer faculty mentors make themselves available to a limited number of learners each year. Studies are conducted in English and over thecourse of the Foundation’s 30-year history, it has enrolled learners from all over the world. Due to the specialized, self-directed natureof each learner’s work, IOU most often attracts registrants over the age of forty who enjoy the ability to use modern technology to engage with great minds from various nations and to create synergies in various fields.
