Dr. Bob McCloud Is Building a Bridge to Albania

You see the ads all the time for pricey sports cars with fierce engines: “Zero to 60,” they scream, “in seven seconds,” or some such. Professor Bob McCloud has taken on a task with similar proportions. His aim is to help bring the educational system of the nation of Albania from the starting line to the twenty-first century in a matter of just four years. Long the basket case of European economies, Albania has set ambitious educational goals aimed to prepare “students to excel in an information-based, technologically advanced society, to create technologically savvy citizens, and to prepare children for college and the job market.” Oh, is that all? To achieve this in a globally interdependent world, the two million school children of Albania will need to adopt and adapt the internet – and do so in a hurry. Dr. McCloud is serving as a consultant to the Ministry of Education on a project that will take four years to fully implement. A one-time Fulbright Fellow in Kosovo – the University’s first – he has spent more than 15 months in the Balkans among a people he truly loves. He returns in October to finish this leg of the project and hand the baton to local educators to carry forward.