From PILOT to PRACTICE: How to SUSTAIN COIL projects in TEACHING

Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is an innovative approach to online teaching and learning, fostering meaningful exchanges between professors and students with peers in geographically distant locations from different cultural backgrounds.
COIL has become a more common format in academic teaching not only due to the situation caused by the pandemic but also because significant funding was made available to universities to set up COIL projects with the purpose of supporting internationalization and encouraging the development of new digital teaching formats
COIL offers great potential in creating new team-taught learning environments, where faculty from different cultures work together to develop a shared syllabus, focusing on experiential and collaborative student learning. It reinforces the development of the digital, intercultural, and social skills necessary for success in the 21st Century workplace and is an efficient tool for internationalization@home, enhancing equality and diversity for all students.
However, despite the considerable funding and highly motivated involved parties, the rollout within the university is often difficult. Reasons for this relate to: hesitation among academics, lacking institutional support, that ultimately leads to unexploited potential for the sustainability of COIL applications within the universities.
The workshop aims to address these reasons, focusing concretely on the following issues:
• What are the success factors for effectively kicking-off and implementing COIL projects?
• How to motivate and engage students and faculty in COIL projects?
• Which stakeholders need to be involved and how to support integration of COIL formats in curricula and university life?
• How to set-up the COIL projects to function as multipliers rather than “specialty shops”?
• What does sustainable integration of COIL at universities look like and what are best practices and success factors for this?