Training
4.3 Consolidaton and intensification
4.3.1 Reflect
For making the most of your COIL activities, try to answer the following questions:
- Can I select one of my own courses/ modules that would benefit from a COIL project?
- Can I identify the learning outcome(s) that could benefit from international teamwork, as well as the partner’s core study area?
- Can I describe how would I embed the development of intercultural competence into the course syllabus?
- Can I outline of the main activities of the COIL project, considering the facilitation, interaction, monitoring, and reflexion phases?
4.3.2 Takeaways
Here you have some takeaways for organising COIL that may also serve as tips to get started:
- Identify potential COIL partners from your personal (or research) network, given that these relationships will be the easiest to build upon. Consider your visiting faculty from abroad;
- Schedule synchronous interaction between teachers and between students, over a sustained period of time, to support and promote more effective asynchronous communication;
- Organise an ice-breaker session so that participants start interacting and everyone is on the same page;
- Resort to a diversified set of assessment tools and methods to ensure participants reach the learning outcomes;
- Intertwine in-person and online activities to monitor and enhance the participants’ experience.
4.3.3 Dig deeper
Here you have some sources for further digging into the issue of COIL:
Balula, A. (2022). Drifts of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) towards pedagogical innovation: A foretelling bibliometric analysis. In A. Reis, J. Barroso, P. Martins, A. Jimoyiannis, R.Y.-M. Huang, & R. Henriques (Eds). Technology and Innovation in Learning, Teaching and Education. TECH-EDU 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1720. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22918-3_32
Collaboratory (2019). Virtual exchange toolkit. The Collaboratory | Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs U.S. Department of State. Retrieved from https://state-low.app.box.com/v/VirtualExchangeToolkit (18 April 2023).
University of Aveiro (2020). COIL@UA. Retrieved from https://www.ua.pt/en/inovacaopedagogica/coil (18 April 2023).
SUNNY COIL Center (n.d.). Faculty Guide for Collaborative Online International Learning. Course Development. Retrieved from http://www.ufic.ufl.edu/UAP/Forms/COIL_guide.pdf (18 April 2023).
Swartz, S., Barbosa, B., & Crawford, I. (2020). Building intercultural competence through virtual team collaboration across global classrooms. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 83(1), 57-79. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329490619878834