COIL

Collaborative Online International Learning

Collaborative Online International 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. It uses online technology to connect faculty in any discipline across national boundaries and brings together intercultural pairings where in-person contact is impractical.

Why COIL?

Graduates, regardless of their fields, will go on to highly globalized communities and workplaces. Every student must be well-prepared for this reality, and 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 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 worldwide, 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 the SUNY COIL Center’s Faculty Guide for Collaborative Online International Learning Course Development.
• Find an international partner to work with. If you need help with this, you can contact Sarah Pattison, Associate Director of Global Engagement, at spattis@umich.edu.
• Review “Effective Practices and Common Challenges in Virtual Exchange” in the Virtual Exchange Impact and Learning Report (pp. 12–17).

COIL Resources

• Virtual Exchange at U-M, including grants for new programs
• Stevens Initiative curated resources
• Stevens Initiative ways to engage, including grants and training
• Assessing intercultural competence
• International Virtual Exchange Conference
• Journal of Virtual Exchange
• US-Japan COIL Initiative
• SUNY COIL Center

For more information about this program, please contact Zachariah Mathew at zmathew@umich.edu.