coil

Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL)

Collaborative Online Learning (COIL), a type of Virtual Exchange, is a web-based global teaching and learning methodology designed to foster faculty and student interaction with peers abroad through co-taught intercultural online and blended learning environments. COIL emphasizes sustained student collaboration to increase intercultural skills. COIL utilizes online technology to connect faculty in any discipline across national boundaries and brings together any intercultural pairings where in-person contact is not practical.

Why COIL?
Graduates, regardless of their fields, will go on to highly globalized communities and workplaces. Thus, it is imperative that every student is well-prepared for this reality.

Diversity/Global Learning is a well-recognized high-impact educational practice.

Institutions that add COIL often do so for the numerous potential educational benefits, such as: “global exposure; cross-cultural interaction and familiarity; intercultural communicative competence…; peer-to-peer learning; awareness of one’s own culture, identity, and assumptions; critical thinking; and perspective-taking.” (Ward, 2016, p. 5)

COIL is a broadly accessible form of global learning. The American Council on Education writes, “While some of the technologies available to support teaching and learning across international borders are expensive, there are comparatively low-tech, low-cost options that can provide opportunities for profound cross-cultural learning. For example, students can use social networking to collaborate across borders. This ubiquitous technology is inexpensive, widely familiar to students around the world, and easily supports asynchronous collaboration for students in different time zones who share common competing demands from work and family” (2011, p. 23).

Getting Started

See SUNY COIL Center’s Faculty Guide for Collaborative Online International Learning Course Development
See sample COIL syllabi (at the bottom of the linked page)
Find an international partner to work with. If you need help with this, you can contact Sarah Pattison, Associate Director of Global Engagement [email protected] for assistance.
Review “Effective Practices and Common Challenges in Virtual Exchange” in the Virtual Exchange Impact and Learning Report (pp. 12-17).

COIL Resources