COIL as a pedagogy
Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is an educational approach where groups or individual students from one institution collaborate with groups or individual students from another institution, in a different country and/or culture, on sustained and assessed projects or assignments, developed collaboratively by tutors from both partner institutions. The collaborative work takes place online, using freely available and commonly used communication technology.
COIL, which is part of the growing field of Virtual Exchange, Telecollaboration, and Globally Networked Learning, was pioneered by the SUNY COIL Centre more than 15 years ago with the vision of "a world free from implicit bias, where people engage across differences to fully connect with others", believing in "an educational environment that fosters shared values, mutual understanding, and critical digital literacy, and which promotes interaction across boundaries to develop leadership, collaborative problem solving and contextualized decision making" (SUNY 2021).
Useful links
COIL and the Arctic
With rapidly increasing interest in the Arctic, the region is brought to the forefront of global discussions, development, investment and political agenda. With this come opportunities, but also considerable challenges to environmental, social, cultural and economic sustainability of many diverse Arctic communities. Education, therefore, is seen as a key tool to overcome many of these challenges, with emphasis on equitable and inclusive access to globally powered and locally delivered learning.
Therefore, COIL provides an inclusive and accessible platform for such learning, where cross-cultural and cross-borders education is delivered to everyone, not only to those who are able to travel abroad. COIL@UArctic projects enable participants to utilise a diverse spectrum of knowledge and approaches to tackle issues, pertinent to the Arctic region, and provide students with skills to succeed in their future careers.
Academic underpinning
There is a growing body of international, practice-based evidence that suggests that participants consider COIL to be a worthwhile, engaging experience that enhances transversal skill development and employability, promotes intercultural and digital competency, and provides a platform to address issues of common or global concern by engaging highly heterogeneous, geographically, and demographically diverse groups.