Empowering education: lessons learned from an innovative COIL & PBL project

Students need to learn, quite early, how to function effectively across cultures and cultural awareness or intercultural competence can help to engage in a heterogenous environment responsibly (Zhao et al. 2018). 

How can we as educators achieve this? Traditionally, students can develop intercultural competence through short-term mobility or participation in semester and year-long programmes at university (Allinson, 2017). This opportunity, however, is not equitably shared amongst different demographic target groups. Students from low-socio economic backgrounds are deprived from such life-changing experiences and extra-curricular opportunities due to financial barriers, for example. We need to build an inclusive environment where all students can taste internationalisation, for example, without leaving home necessarily. 

COIL

Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) can evolve to become an efficient and rewarding educational approach for students and educators to diversify mobility options and to offer internationalisation at home. 

Using COIL, students from different geographical and cultural backgrounds interact with each other to learn and work together in a virtual environment (Guth & Rubin, 2015). COIL relies on deploying various online technologies to bridge access between universities from different parts of the world and helps to create an internationalised curriculum. 

Why COIL and PBL? 

As a practitioner of COIL, you are creating a syllabus that is team-taught by culturally diverse teachers, who come together to jointly organise and lead the COIL project with the goal of linking university-level teachers and students from geographically, culturally and linguistically different backgrounds.  

Project-based learning (PBL) is another pedagogical approach, which focuses on an inquiry-based learning, where students learn from each other addressing real world issues and authentic questions. 

The objective of our COIL was to develop a well-designed, long-term collaboration between three international partners across three different time zones, working in gender and nationality mixed groups of students. Using a PBL approach, students developed a virtual academic conference. 

Key lessons learned 

Lesson One: Typically, before launching a COIL the participating universities must be identified, students need to be recruited and the design of the COIL must have taken place.  

Our COIL with a PBL element lasted four months and consisted of a series of synchronous and asynchronous sessions. It is important to agree on this prior to the implementation, because any deviation may lead to a poor student experience and quality of the project. 

Lesson two: It is important to present the COIL very professionally, comparable to other credit-bearing modules studied at a university. Following this approach, you can expect high levels of student engagement, and it would serve as a benchmark for future COILs. To address this, we suggest you put together a ‘welcome pack’, which can be shared with all COIL participating students. This welcome pack serves the purpose of creating a sense of belonging and can be enhanced by capturing a ‘COIL welcome video’ and a ‘COIL card’ which can consist of short videos of the academics who are leading the COIL from the partnering universities greeting and welcoming the students to the COIL. 

Finally, we suggest that you share a ‘COIL compass’ to all students. A ‘COIL compass’ was developed to illustrate how the COIL is organised and delivered. 

Lesson three: COIL projects rely on the effective use of online and digital tools to foster collaborative working, social interaction and exchange of meaningful dialogues. To maximise the benefits of online collaboration, it was important that all three universities had access to a good digital infrastructure. We used (relevant) software and technology applications to construct a VE environment and communicate with distant peers and to engage in an international learning experience. 

Lesson four: With the support of digital and online tools, participating students from Germany, UK and South Korea engaged with each other. 

Practitioners should invest time in researching different digital tools and select those that would help to deliver the COIL as well as enable students to learn something new. For example, we used Cisco Webex for our five virtual masterclasses and a series of coaching sessions which proved to be a reliable and student friendly digital tool. 

Meetings

For future meetings outside the COIL schedule, groups were organising virtual team meetings on Zoom or MS Teams to meet up with their peers online to work as a team on their group and organisational projects. To keep all students informed about important deadlines, homework and future synchronous and asynchronous activities, a platform that is accessible by all students is needed. Practitioners should agree on this early on and seek guest access for external students. In our project, we used a partners’ internal moodle system and provided all students free access.  

 Private channel

We would highly recommend a private channel on MS Teams and Padlet to conduct the introductory and ice-breaker activities, whilst Asana, a project management software could help you as a one-stop shop to effectively monitor, manage and plan your end product. Students used this application to plan the virtual student conference related tasks and duties.  

 Funding

If you have funding available, you could consider purchasing a suitable streaming platform to create a customisable event solution with access to different interaction and communication opportunities, planning and content features. We made use of some funding to purchase a license to use a streaming platform to run our virtual academic student conference. Use of advanced streaming platforms can help you to present the virtual student conference on a digitally and professionally proven platform that is on par with professional and industry standards, giving your online visitors a full online conference experience as we experienced. You can use your university’s official YouTube channel to stream live and if you wish to integrate a Q&A feature to your virtual conference, we recommend Wooclap to pick up questions from the audience. 

With the above suggestions, you can develop any COIL with a PBL approach of your choice and discipline, and it would engage students with constructive investigations that are both challenging and rewarding.  

Dr Sathees Kunjuthamby works at University of Greenwich, and Professor Dr Isabel Lausberg works at Hochschule Ruhrwest in Germany. You can find out more about Sathees’ and Isabel’s work on their respective staff profiles here  

References 

Allinson, K. (2017). Widening Participation in UK Outward Student Mobility – A picture of participation 

Guth, S., & Rubin, J. (2015). How to get started with COIL. In A. Moore & S. Simon (Eds.), Globally networked teaching in the humanities: Theories and practices (pp. 15–27). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group 

Zhao, X. U., Yu, E., and Zhang, S. (2018). A normative anchor, a developmental perspective, and a discursive approach. J. Educ. Thought (JET)/Revue de La Pensée Éducative 51, 261–280.