Students in Qatar are virtual classmates in CU's Psych 101 lecture class

By Susan Lang

Considering that professor of psychology James B. Maas has been teaching Psychology 101 for 41 years, many of the 60,000 undergraduates he's taught in the world's largest single lecture class have come from far corners of the Earth. Now, the course itself is being beamed to one of those far corners: 7,000 miles across the Atlantic to premedical students attending Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC-Q).

Jowhara Al Qahtani, left, and Zeinab Ammous, right, premedical students at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, talk with Professor James Maas during his fall break visit to Doha, Qatar, where he delivered a Psychology 101 lecture in person. Provided

State-of-the-art facilities for distance learning allow 27 students in Doha, Qatar, to view every lecture Maas gives this semester on a huge rear projection screen powered by three projectors and a dual-processor computer built into the lectern. The sophisticated facilities give the students a good view of every video, film and slide that Maas uses to illustrate his lectures in Ithaca.

"In essence, they're taking the exact course that Cornell students in Ithaca take," said Maas, who recently returned from a fall break trip to WCMC-Q to give two lectures and a seminar and to meet the students taking his course. "They witness the exact lecture I give in Ithaca, take the same prelims and then every other week, we have an interactive class discussion via a videoconference."

Although the students are thousands of miles away and Maas only meets them in person for two days, Maas says he actually gets to know them better than most of the students in his Ithaca class. "In Ithaca, I only talk personally to the ones out of the 771 I have this semester who stop by during my office hours," said Maas. His course covers a wide range of issues, from mind control, critical thinking, sleep and dreams to cognitive development, learning, operant conditioning, happiness, TV and society, clinical psychology and parenting.

"The students absolutely loved the chance to meet Dr. Maas in person," stated Brandon Otto '04 from WCMC-Q, where he is the teaching assistant for the course. "The nicest thing about teaching Psych 101 in this way is that it connects the students here with the students in Ithaca, making them feel part of the bigger whole that is Cornell. The other day Dr. Maas showed a live picture of the class in Statler [Hall], and the students were absolutely awestruck by the size of the class. Many of them have also started being pen pals with the students in Ithaca, which, again, I think contributes to them feeling part of something bigger and makes this experience more special."

For Sara Hassan, a WCMC-Q premedical student from Egypt, the distance learning aspect of the class has few drawbacks. "I think that Dr. Maas' class is the most interesting one we have," she stated. "It is very helpful not only for our studies, but also for our everyday lives. Plus, Dr. Maas is just the best fit for a psychology teacher. He knows how to make us learn and how to interest us."

Her classmate, Suehyb Alkhatib, a U.S. and Jordanian citizen who considers himself Circassian (a region in the Karachay-Cherkessia republic of the Russian Federation), said that the streamed course gives the WCMC-Q students a sense of belonging to Cornell. "We don't feel as distanced from the actual class as some might believe. Those 771 students taking the Psych 101 lectures are taking the lecture with us, and we don't really differentiate ourselves from them," he wrote in an e-mail.

The distance-learning course, which is taught in Qatar for the second time this fall, is proving so successful that several other medical courses are copying its format. "The success of Psych 101 shows that the system works," said David Robertshaw, associate dean for premedical education at WCMC-Q. "It's now being copied in the medical school curriculum; some lectures are being taught in the same way from Weill Cornell in Manhattan."

WCMC-Q was inaugurated in October 2002 and began with a two-year, nondegree course of study to prepare students for medical school. The first class of students, most from Middle Eastern countries including Qatar, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are enrolled in a premedical program that offers identical curricula to the premedical courses offered at Cornell in Ithaca. Classes not only cover psychology but also chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, neuroscience, microbiology and medical ethics, except that the courses are crammed into a two-year program. In 2003, WCMC-Q moved into its new building in Education City, which is about the size of two football fields and hosts 15 Cornell faculty members.