The creation of the master program “Intellectual Encounters of the Islamicate World” (IEIW) at the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) was a shared initiative of stakeholders for the internationalization of higher education and development in Germany to pilot an online degree. Growing awareness of the crucial role that access to higher education and advanced professional training play for economic development in the Middle East culminated in the launch of this project by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), with funding made available by the Federal Ministry for International Cooperation and Economic Development (BMZ). An online master program bringing Israeli and Palestinian students together in the study of their shared religious history was expected to foster capacities for intercultural dialogue in future professionals and to broaden access to advanced graduate degrees for marginalized groups.

Between 2013 and 2019, this multi-stakeholder intervention had to balance a complex set of higher education, development, and political goals. Operating within the fairly rigid legal and organizational framework of a German university, the project team succeeded in overcoming expected and unexpected challenges while relying on limited resources. The shape they gave to the resulting project dis-plays a number of unique characteristics, unforeseen and unplanned at launch time. For the academic component of instruction and assessment, the team developed innovative blended-learning approaches and instructional formats. Likewise, the project saw the emergence of effective ad-ministrative workflows and suitable strategies for flexible project management.

By publishing a condensed account in this handbook during the final iteration of the original funding period, six years after its effective launch and steady implementation of the IEIW MA program, we are attempting to capture lessons that may be taken away from this pilot project. The sections of this report should be read as disaggregated findings. When viewed together and after the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle fall into their respective places, the sections reveal the impact that separate design decisions and over-lapping agendas had on the overall program design. The accompanying infographics provide a visualization of the multiple relationships and interfaces to aid the integration of the individual elements of the project into project time-lines, organizational structure, stakeholder expectations and educational outcomes.

The account of creating and implementing the IEIW MA program over its seven-year duration cannot be fully cap-tured by an examination of learning outcomes, graduation rates and alumni employment trajectories alone. Various internal reports and external evaluations have thoroughly documented such quantifiable indicators for reporting to funding agencies as fully met. At the time of this writing, a total of 72 students have successfully graduated with a master’s degree since 2013, and another 19 participants are about to follow suit in the current academic year. Some have been able to leverage their studies into professional careers, others are continuing in academic programs for a PhD, still others are looking for steady employment. Their advanced degree in intercultural studies is, in any case, an asset for career advancement in their home regions and beyond.

Gauging the systemic impact of educational interventions or their long-term effectiveness remains difficult. From a development perspective, higher education is best considered as a societal investment, whose returns are long-term, qualitative and indeterminate. Numerous environmental factors determine success and sustainability independent of individual learning outcomes or the program’s academic reputation for excellence. Since the launch of the IEIW program in 2013, the political climate in the Middle East, for example, has taken a drastic turn towards more adversarial positions. Project performance on various levels was negatively impacted by the increase in hostility, the most significant of which was the early revelation in 2014 that it would be impossible for Palestinian institutions to formally participate in the trilateral partnership as originally foreseen. Somewhat ironically, the growing polarization in the region has brought increased engagement with intercultural dialogue in some organizations, increasing employment opportunities for some program alumni. While this unexpected development is creating a positive data point for quantitative evaluations of post-graduation employment rates, it clearly perverts the original spirit of the intervention.

Alumni Konferenz 2017, Foto: Wannenmacher

To avoid redundancy with existing project documentation and to complement the previous evaluations, this publication attempts to capture key aspects of the project design processes in order to make them available to a broader audience for discussion and reflection. Drawing on numerous aspects of administration, multiple stakehol-der perspectives and occasional anecdotes of the project history as recounted by various participants, these pages contain a concise, ex-post interpretation of crucial milestones factoring in the project’s success. Although they are intimately connected and mutually constitutive in reality, they have been separated here analytically.

One half of this handbook illuminates strategies for the design of an academic format geared to skills-training in transdisciplinary research and intercultural dialogue, viewed from learning and instruction perspectives. The ultimate form of the program’s educational design was influenced strongly by the cognitive skills defined as successful learning outcomes and by the blended learning technologies available at the time. The insights captured 9here may prove useful to developers of technology-enhanced learning arrangements that are expected to offer a composite of cognitive skills, both disciplinary and general, suitable for graduate or post-graduate students of higher education.

The other half of this handbook takes an administrative perspective to describe salient aspects of project design. The work of organizing and governing an interdisciplinary distance-learning program for students from the Middle East must address the contiguities of socio-politically fragile contexts. Strongly shaped by concrete political and cultural tensions, a key requirement for the project’s functionality was its strategic compatibility with the higher education landscape in Germany and operational com-pliance with its host university in Berlin. It may therefore yield reference points for practitioners negotiating the challenges entailed in bridging similarly fragile contexts within a more structurally robust educational environment.

Stakeholder cooperation of the kind described within this report has moved out of the exploratory stage, growing into a more common strategic approach to the nexus of higher education and development. While this handbook has a strong practical bent, it also identifies some general principles for such endeavors and suitable indicators for success in this context. Both the dynamics of fragile contexts and technological innovation cycles defy any notion of permanence, so a collection of experiential insights might prove helpful for practitioners and decision-makers in higher education, including innovators, oversight bodies, evaluators and funders.

The intended audience of this publication has implications for its terminology and style. While current research in intercultural distance education or Middle Eastern development is occasionally referenced, this study draws overwhelmingly on the accumulated expertise of practitioners and available project documentation. We have sought to keep references to the vast body of literature relevant to the subject to the absolute minimum helpful for further reading in order to maintain focus on practical application. The account presented is based on project documentation, various workshops and interviews with members of the project team and other stakeholders, primarily in the summer and fall of 2018. It is fueled by their enthusiasm and dedication for an experimental venture which, in light of the myriad obstacles in its path, could have easily failed. Funders, students, and administrators alike willingly accepted the associated uncertainties. One key undertaking in the trajectory and the accomplishments of the overall project involved carefully calculating and balancing the inevitable risks.

The IEIW program’s subject matter – philosophical and intellectual history in the Arabic-speaking societies of the Middle Ages – inevitably infuses the overall project narrative just as much as the conflictual political context of the contemporary Middle East. From this setting flows a choice in terminology taken in the interest of easier accessibility for the reader. Unless noted otherwise, the term “intercultural” is used here to explicitly include the crossing of both international and interreligious borders. To clarify, this terminology does not equate a religion and/or nation with a particular religious or national culture, which is a common fallacy in politically charged discourses regarding the Middle East conflict. Instead, the terminology sig-nals a broad understanding of “culture” as the amalgamation of cultural practices, including religious practices, as shaped by the institutions of a nation state and state-like entities. Together, social practices and institutional structures inform both the personal identity of an individual and limit the overall set of expectations that shape her communicative actions. The basic assumption behind the IEIW program that drove its methodological and pedagogical design was the conceptualization of these social practices on a continuous scale with gradual differences, and not as distinct categories with clearly demarcated boundaries to overcome.

Such intercultural challenges of distance education are surely more pronounced and require more sensitive solutions in the conflictual setting of the Middle East. They may be harder to discern in other circumstances, but in situations where technologically mediated learning can bridge educational systems and cultural traditions, they are no less relevant to communicative practices. The terminology serves a second purpose in that it underlines how observations and strategies emanating from the project described here are relevant beyond its subject matter and geographic focus. Bound up with these challenges as they are, they are not intended as best practices to replicate, but may be transposed into structurally similar situations to mark fault lines more clearly and to improve orientation for all stakeholders involved.

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