(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University and a pair of universities in Ghana took the first steps in their cooperative relationship with shared online courses earlier this year, and the connection is set to expand during the 2026-27 academic year to become part of SOU’s Global Innovation Scholars program – which includes reciprocal opportunities for community-based projects in each country.

The initial joint undertakings included a pair of communication courses, conducted online with students from SOU and Palm University College in Kordiabe, Ghana. The two universities will participate next spring in a shared business course that will include two-week student exchanges – either in-person or online – to work with faculty, universities, community organizations and business owners on projects in both Ghana and southern Oregon.

“Our work with Ghana has developed quite intentionally over time,” said Dee Fretwell Carreon, director of both SOU’s Center for Professional Development and the university’s Global Innovation Scholars (GIS) program.

“In partnership with our Ghanaian colleagues and donors, we began by using COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) as a way to build relationships and test meaningful academic collaboration between SOU and our partner universities before moving toward a larger immersive program,” Carreon said.

It was COIL, a teaching methodology used by various institutions around the world since 2006, that led to a unique spring term course that was taught online to two very different groups of students in southern Oregon and Ghana. For SOU students, it was COMM 460F – an upper division offering that focused on the intersections of communication, fashion, media and culture. That class connected online with Palm University’s Communication Skills course – a lower-division, first-year college course that introduced the fundamentals of communication.

“Even though our collaboration with Palm University was unlikely – our class being an upper division class on fashion, textiles and communication and Palm University’s class being a lower-division, first-year fundamentals of communication course – we used our differences as a catalyst for curiosity,” said Precious Yamaguchi, the professor of communication who taught the SOU course.

“The students were different ages, they were in different countries, time zones and from different cultures, but we did not face these challenges with discouragement,” Yamaguchi said. “Instead, we approached these obstacles with enthusiasm and curiosity.”

Yamaguchi gave a presentation on the SOU-Ghana collaboration in August at the 13^th annual Focus Conference, an international forum in South Africa that spotlights academic issues. She addressed “Overcoming Division: COIL Connections Between Ghana and the United States.”

 “I received a lot of positive feedback on my presentation because other African countries such as South Africa have been enthusiastically participating in COIL as well,” Yamaguchi said. “They enjoyed seeing the U.S. and Ghana collaborate, as SOU and Palm University did through COIL.”

The next SOU-Ghanaian collaborations, planned for early 2027, will be part of SOU’s Global Innovation Scholars program and also will receive funding from an Essieh Family Foundation grant that is intended to cultivate SOU’s relationships with both Palm University and Catholic University of Ghana, in Sunyani. The foundation was created by Portland business leaders Matt and Emmanuella Essieh, who met as international students at SOU.

Senior instructor Erica Knotts will take students from a Communication class to Ghana, and the School of Business will launch a Ghanaian version of the hybrid exchange program it launched in a 2022 partnership with the business program at Universidad de Guanajuato – SOU’s sister university in Mexico. That business development initiative enables nine students from each university to spend a total of 20 weeks researching, analyzing and assisting three businesses each in Guanajuato and Ashland. The course includes international, online coursework during each year’s winter and spring terms, and week-long site visits to each city.

“Rather than being solely a traditional exchange, the (Ghanaian) program is being designed around sustained, project-based collaboration between students, faculty, universities and community organizations in southern Oregon and Ghana,” Carreon said.

The collaboration with Ghanaian universities will start with two business projects in southern Oregon and two in Ghana. There is also some uncertainty around the Ghanaian visit to Ashland due to current restrictions on visas for students coming to the U.S., but the program will go forward with that portion of the reciprocal exchange conducted online, if necessary.

“We are continuing to build the program in ways that allow the academic and community collaboration to move forward even as we navigate those external variables,” Carreon said.

This spring’s COIL collaborations that made online Communication courses possible for students in both countries were not part of the Global Innovation Scholars program, which features in-person exchanges, but those classes laid a solid cooperative relationship for what is to come.

“Those experiences helped us learn how students and faculty could work together across institutions and countries, and they ultimately helped create the foundation for what has now developed into the Ghana-based Global Innovation Scholars (GIS) program,” Carreon said.

“COIL has been much more than a series of individual courses; it has provided a really valuable pathway for building trust, experimenting with international collaboration and ultimately creating something much more ambitious together.”

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