Collaborative Online International Learning: The Example of a Course in the Psychology of Terrorism in the United States and Iran

In the fall of 2008, a very interesting and exciting opportunity for an international collaboration started to take shape. At Purchase College, the director of the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Center, Jon Rubin, had recently been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the creation of several collaborative online international courses. Building on my previous experience in offering a course in the Psychology of Terrorism seemed like a natural extension of the traditional classroom experience into a new and collaboratively developed class that would take place online, and across cultures. Thus, the search for a partner began. My initial contact with Abdolhossein Abdollahi came when he responded to an announcement about the course that I sent to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology email listserv. Prior to our contact, I was familiar with some of Abdolhossein’s research on the topics of Terror Management Theory and terrorism (e.g., Pyszczynski, Abdollahi, Solomon, Greenberg, Cohen, & Weise, 2006; Pyszczynski, Rothschild, & Abdollahi, 2008). Needless to say, when he emailed me about forging a partnership, I was quite excited about the possibilities of our collaboration.