U.S. Rice University signs virtual exchange agreement with foreign universities

HOUSTON, Dec. 5 (Xinhua) -- Rice University, located in Houston of Texas state, signed an agreement with eight other universities around the world that will allow students to enroll in online courses, according to a news release by the university on Tuesday.

Rice University is the first one in the United States to offer this kind of collaborative international learning environment to students. The agreement allows for an exchange of enrollments at no additional cost to students.

Each of the nine universities will select three to 10 of their existing credit-bearing online courses for the global virtual exchange agreement. During the three-year pilot program, students from the participating schools can enroll in selecting online courses from the other member schools and receive transfer credits.

The pilot program will begin in next January. Rice will initially offer some of its summer online courses as part of the catalog available to students in the exchange program. When the pilot program is completed in 2020, Rice will review the data to assess the demand for the courses and how students respond to and benefit from them.

In addition to Rice University, the partnering universities are the Australian National University, the University of Adelaide and the University of Queensland, all in Australia; the Delft University of Technology, Leiden University and Wageningen University and Research, all in the Netherlands; the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland; and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in China. Enditem