An equal digital footing – Equity in Virtual Exchange & COIL Projects

As focus in higher education shifts to future skills such as digital and collaborative intercultural competencies, universities need to become a place for experiential learning. Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) enables teachers to incorporate these skills and learning practices into their courses, giving their students a unique, equitable and integrated international experience.

By harnessing contributions and perspectives from institutions and practitioners from around the globe we will tackle the issue of readiness for COIL from multiple perspectives. Participants will explore challenges such as equity in collaboration, appropriate mindsets and institutional readiness through multi-perspective groupwork.

Interested in fostering or developing international virtual collaboration at your institution? Or you just want to learn more about what COIL can offer? Then this is the workshop for you!

Method: This workshop incorporates methodologies often employed during COIL projects, such as collaborative group work, short icebreaker activities etc. The session will kick-off with a plenum session with a short input from the workshop facilitators on the COIL methodology, the opportunities it offers and the importance of multi-level institutional readiness for COIL. The facilitators, who have varied geographical and professional backgrounds, will draw upon their own experiences related to COIL. Short icebreaker activities to get to know one another will then be employed. The facilitators will then split the participants into randomly assigned breakout rooms. Each room will be assigned an institutional role, i.e. student, lecturer, administrator. Each room will then view a common challenge through the lens of their specific institutional role for approximately 15 minutes. After breaking out of their stakeholder groups or “silos” the participants will come together to share their differing perspectives and reflect upon their learnings.