What does COIL look like?

Internationalization at home

COIL promotes curricular internationalization or internationalization at home by allowing students to learn course content locally through the eyes and experiences of foreign peers. COIL promotes experiential learning whereby students don’t merely learn about global issues, but live them through effectively designed collaborative activities. At the heart of COIL courses and modules is student-to-student interaction.

Duration

COIL projects usually bring students together to engage in collaborative projects ranging from 5-12 weeks.

Format

Most COIL projects have a hybrid or blended format: students meet with their local peers and teachers in their classroom and collaborate with foreign peers online. In some cases, one or both of the partners teach fully online courses.

Technology

When possible, the best approach to technology in COIL courses is to use both synchronous (real-time, e.g. Skype) and asynchronous (e.g. discussion forums) tools: the former is more spontaneous, while the latter allows for more reflection. COIL projects make use of easily available social media tools such as Skype, traditional technologies such as email, and/or institutions’ learning management systems (LMS) ( e.g. Moodle, Blackboard). The choice depends on both partners’ access to technology and familiarity with different tools and is fundamentally determined by the shared student learning outcomes.

Language

English tends to be the primary language used in COIL projects for two reasons:
•    English is increasingly the lingua franca used around the globe for international communication.
•    Foreign peers are often multilingual, while American students are often monolingual.
Working with the COIL Center, teams can find solutions to integrate other languages into projects. Experience has demonstrated that American students who participate in COIL projects become more interested in studying abroad and in learning foreign languages.

COIL-ing an Existing course

Creating a New COIL course

Italy: English as a Second Language Germany: MA in Teacher Education Shared Module: English Conversation & European Identity Duration of Online Collaborative Activity: 6 weeks Language: English Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs): Shared SLO 1: practice and improve conversation skills and fluency in spoken English Shared SLO 2: research, discuss and reflect on issues concerning contemporary Europe Shared SLO 3: exploration of national/regional/local identity vs. European identity Italian SLO: practice writing skills in English German SLO: practice correcting student work and providing effective feedback to ESL learners Tools: Skype, wiki (pbworks.com) Activities: Each week students engaged in the following work cycle starting with Pre-task on the upper-left. The German students provide linguistic feedback to the learner diaries the Italian students kept on the wiki. Final Project: Collaborative creation of an intercultural collage. Students shared pictures on the wiki and then chose which pictures to use and the location of them in the collage during a Skype session.

USA: Gender Studies Russia: Linguistics COIL course: Gender Roles Across Cultures Duration: 15 weeks Language: English Tools: Google sites, Blogger, Youtube and a tool called Lecture Capture Activities: As can be seen in the figure below, the course blog was used both to prepare for the seven synchronous classroom lectures & discussions and to reflect on these. This gave the Russian students sufficient time to read and respond to the materials and American students’ posts in English. Content: Seven themes pulling materials from the Internet ranging from articles to movies and videos on Youtube. To adapt to the constraints associated with bandwidth, students developing the content for a final topic-based project focusing on it from the two perspectives, but presented them individually. Student feedback: “The Coil Russia interactions – extremely fascinating to view from a different country in real-time and to blog back and forth with them.”  (US) “The most interesting for me were videoconferences with American students, possibility to share our experience with them and to hear their point of view and experience.” (RU)