Dr Jean-Bernard Adrey taught languages in France, the USA, England and Italy before taking positions in international higher education management and leadership in the UK and the US. During his tenure as Director of the Centre for Global Engagement at Coventry University, he received several awards including Coventry City Council’s 2013 Award for Community Cohesion (Culturae Mundi project) and the EAIE’s 2014 Institutional Award for Innovation in Internationalisation (for the Model for Progression in International Experience). Founding Director of HE consultancy firm TJ Global Services, he provides internationalisation services to multiple UK, US, European and Middle Eastern universities and organizations. Since the 2010s, he has also been training academics worldwide on Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) methodologies and design with a special focus on the acquisition of intercultural competences.
Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) has become one of the most popular approaches to internationalising curricula thus featuring high on the agenda to develop Internationalisation-at-Home (IaH) academic frameworks. IaH seeks to achieve the purposeful integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the formal and informal curriculum for all students within domestic learning environments.
Since the mid-2010s, COIL ‘hubs’ and communities have emerged around the world that offer academics not only COIL-focused professional development opportunities so they can in turn embed COIL methodologies in their institutions and programmes, but also dedicated conferences and research centres to report on pedagogical practice and related applied research findings.
Originally coined in the US by Professor Jon Rubin, the COIL acronym has rapidly disseminated since the late 2000s and is now routinely used as a catch-all phrase though it still cohabits with other terminology such as Virtual Exchanges, Telecollaboration, Globally Network Learning, Virtually Mobility, etc.
Despite inevitable nuances in terminology and approaches, the fundamental paradigm at play revolves around an action learning framework through which academics and their respective students collaborate online, synchronously and/or asynchronously, with the ultimate aims of exploring international perspectives and/or gaining collaborative, digital and intercultural skills.
Benefits of COIL as a Method for IAH
The number of COIL projects have soared since the mid-2010s (and exponentially since the Covid-19 crisis) because the format responds to the widening participation imperative of IaH proponents to offer international learning experiences to all, outside of physical student mobility (which remains the prerogative of about only 3% of all students worldwide according to the UNESCO).
Beyond this widening participation impact, this paper looks at the impact COIL projects have on stakeholders’ learning and scrutinizes the almost-universal claim that participation in COIL projects ‘automatically’ entails the acquisition of intercultural competences.
Whilst such a claim may not come as a surprise given the very design and aims of the projects, some ambiguity remains as to what intercultural competences are actually acquired and how that learning can be measured and validated. For examples, in large number of instances, studies on COIL projects report on:
- Fostering comparative perspectives in the disciplinary focus of the collaborative project (e.g. comparing marketing practices, public policies, doctor-patient relationships, student life, etc, in cultures A and B),
- Building communities of ‘aspiring’ global citizens using learning outcomes derived UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with the ultimate view to create sustainability through research and trans-national civic engagement.
- Uses of pedagogy and collaborative design patterns as a way to promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) principles, sometimes even with the declared ambition to contribute to the de-colonization or de-westernization of curricula.
Further, in addition to gaining new disciplinary or inter-disciplinary knowledge, other skills are often highlighted as preponderant and key outcomes of participation in COIL:
- collaborative skills (e.g. students are tasked with co-creating some output),
- digital literacy (e.g. students learn how to use specific communication tools and identify sound netiquette practices),
- foreign language skills,
- intercultural skills.
Intercultural Learning in COIL Projects
In many project evaluations over the years, intercultural Learning has uncritically been presented as a natural, and even systematic ‘by-product’ of participating in COIL projects, which would just seem to ‘happen to take place’ thanks to interactions with cultural others. This may have happened based on the false premiss that being exposed to other cultures renders you able to navigate them effectively and appropriately or simply by failing to acknowledge and address cross-cultural communication and collaborative challenges. In such contexts where intercultural learning was assumed to take place, explicit, objective intercultural learning assessment strategies almost became unnecessary, hence their absence.
Recent studies have sought to address the gap in measuring the impact of COIL in terms of intercultural learning but many of these largely rely on participants’ self-evaluation and since COIL projects are presented as frameworks to acquire intercultural skills, their acquisition become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet some studies have reported that whilst many students felt more confident in engaging cultural others, they did not feel equipped to manage collaborative or cross-cultural conflicts and misunderstandings when these emerged.
What clearly emerges is the need for a more sophisticated approach to intercultural learning which a focus on intercultural competence beyond mere comparative perspectives.
From Intercultural Competences to Diversity, Equality and Inclusivity
Professor Darla Deardorff, an expert in intercultural competence acquisition defines intercultural competence as the ability to communicate and operate appropriately and effectively in multicultural contexts and teams drawing on one’s knowledge, attitudes and skills.
The aim is therefore first to understand differences and then to become able to navigate them in ways that are not only effective but also appropriate in respecting the diversity of habits and preferences in multicultural contexts.
In this model, knowledge is about raising cultural awareness of others’ and one’s own mindsets by exploring different ways of feeling, thinking, and doing whilst avoiding stereotypes and biases. It is primarily about understanding values, norms, practices, facts, frameworks, etc, and is largely cognitive in nature. It can be culture-specific and/or about understanding dimensions of cultures in general. Most COIL projects with learning outcomes focused on comparing international perspectives and practices would belong to that category.
Intercultural Attitudes are about recognizing and accepting diversity and fostering values of curiosity, inclusivity, tolerance, empathy; this can lead to practicing listening for understanding and the willingness of accommodating otherness. Most COIL participants would claim that successful COIL projects have enhanced their positive attitudes towards diversity and inclusion and their own confidence in engaging others. This dimension is largely affective in nature.
But ultimately cross-cultural- and self-awareness and fostering more inclusive attitudes do not suffice in navigating differences in habits and preferences effectively and appropriately. They do reflect greater intercultural sensitivity and can even attest to a shift away from ethnocentric views towards accepting otherness but what is needed is the ability to summon different behaviors and ultimately more agility/skills in managing diversity for better and more appropriate efficiency and effectiveness.
This is not to be taken for granted by any means as participant in cross-cultural encounters may experience various forms of resistance to altering their natural inclinations, systems of habits and preferences to accommodate others’ whose preferred ways of acting, doing and patterns of feeling can be distant from their own. This kind of accommodation requires finding common ground and it takes both the will to do it and commensurate adaptation skills.
Conclusion – Towards New Approaches to COIL Professional Development that Can Foster Deep Intercultural Learning and Skills Development
From there it follows that we need to devise strategies to help prepare students move alongside all three levels of intercultural competence and not merely help them become just cultural aware or more open to recognizing and accepting diversity. For COIL projects to be genuinely and deeply impactful in terms of intercultural learning, pedagogical strategies need deploying to help participants move beyond their comfort zones to accommodate cultural others.
In an inclusive approach, with everyone stepping towards the other, we can finally enter a new space which is nobody’s original comfort zone but a ‘third’ space of inclusivity and respect that will help us evolve and adapt to maintain intercultural dialogues and build adaptive models to engage and collaborate with other cultures in non-hierarchical ways.
As a preamble to delivering COIL projects, to prepare academics and students to enter and shape these third spaces, professional development programmes need to articulate a whole new approach to defining and assessing intercultural learning outcomes.
Reference
- Beelen, J., Jones, E. (2015). Redefining Internationalization at Home. In: Curaj, A., Matei, L., Pricopie, R., Salmi, J., Scott, P. (eds) The European Higher Education Area. Springer, Cham.
- Deardorff, D. (2006). Identification and assessment of intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationalization, Journal of Studies in International Education, 10(3), 241-266.