Collaborative Online International Education Programme
Nowadays we are dealing with far-reaching globalization in many areas, making it important for students to be educated on how they can work optimally in diverse teams and achieve better results. By internationalizing education of students, they can train their skills in working in diverse groups. By using Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) principles, teachers and students can engage with their peers abroad. Eventually these COIL principles should be embedded in a programme, created to support teachers in creating courses with an international character, which is exactly what this project aims to do.
Background
By internationalizing (parts of the) education, students learn how to collaborate with other students with different cultural backgrounds and get to train their skills in working in diverse groups, thus enhancing their intercultural competencies. One way to incorporate internationalization within courses, is by making use of online collaborative teaching. With these online collaborative courses, it’s an amazing chance to create courses in which students experience working together with international students and train their intercultural competencies.
To help teachers teaching intercultural groups, a programme will be started to develop teachers in the field of online international collaborative teaching. A well-fitting model to achieve the aim of interculturally educated students is via internationalizing our education by using the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) principles. COIL is the term that is used to refer to ‘virtual mobility’ experiences that are embedded into the formal curriculum and provide students with an opportunity to interact with peers at international universities and professionals, so they can develop intercultural competences and digital skills while working together on subject-specific learning tasks or activities. COIL is a well-developed model for enhancing the inclusiveness of university curricula (Villar-Onrubia & Rajpal, 2016). Through COIL modules, students and teachers are able to engage with their peers at different universities abroad, collaborate more easily and develop intercultural skills (Appiah-Kubi & Annan, 2020).
Project description
Methods and planning
As stated before, we want this to be a co-creation project with the participants following the programme. Therefore, we can roughly design the 1st iteration, identify fields and specific knowledge we find important, and start looking for experts within the university, but will always be reacting to the needs and problems of our participants.
The project aims to help teachers setting up an online international course which subsequently strengthens the intercultural competencies of students who follow those specific courses. The underlying idea is to shape and prepare students for future research and work in organizations where employees from multiple cultures work together. While creating the new online international courses, teachers will be innovating their education since they are making use of the principles of blended learning. Next to this, the programme will aim to encourage teachers to look for new innovative ways of teaching as this is more fitting for online education. The output of this project is to create a programme in which teachers from the UGS, GSNS and GSLS set up or redesign their own course that includes online internationalization as a fundamental basic. The core of this programme consists of lessons on managing an international classroom, implementing activities to enhance intercultural competencies, creating a blended design for the course, and exploring the support structures at our university. In total we aim for at least six redesigned or newly created courses. The online character of the newly created or enhanced courses brings additional benefits for students: they do not have to worry about financial consequences due to travelling and housing abroad because they can attend classes on the campus of Utrecht. Furthermore, online courses concerning internationalization will reduce flights which contributes to one of the main goals of Utrecht University: being more sustainable. Internationalization is not only a principle specific for the science faculty. This enables us to deploy the programme over multiple faculties when the first run of the training receives positive reactions and leads to the successful creation of online international courses. Afterwards, the participants of this programme will in turn be able to disperse their knowledge of setting up online international courses between colleagues. They will be our ambassadors of COIL principles to others around them. Thereby reaching a larger amount of teachers, who might be interested in online and international courses. If the programme turns out to be a success, we will see if this programme can be run again either for the faculty or even for the university as a whole. Appiah-Kubi, P., & Annan, E. (2020). A review of a collaborative online international learning. International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy, 10(1). Nissen, E., & Kurek, M. (2020). The impact of virtual exchange on teachers’ pedagogical competences and pedagogical approach in higher education. Retrieved from: hdl. handle. net/11370/bb89998b-c08b-41f4-aee6-08faf1208433. Villar-Onrubia, D. & Rajpal, B. (2016). Online international learning, Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 20(2-3), 75-82. DOI: 10.1080/13603108.2015.1067652
Aims
Results
References
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