IIGE Vice-Director, Prof. Keiko Ikeda, and Specially-Appointed Assistant Prof. Sajjad Pouromid led a two-part interactive workshop at SIIEJ 2021 on Saturday, November 20th titled, "Principles and Practices for Enhancing Intercultural and International Experiences in COIL Courses." In this workshop, participants learned more about COIL and its online applications in international higher education and was geared toward both beginner and experienced practitioners looking for ways to implement COIL practice at their home institutions. 

 

The workshop opened with an explanation of COIL and other various forms of Virtual Exchange (VE), how COIL benefits students in higher education and faculty prior to the pandemic, as well as the impact of the pandemic on international higher education and how COIL can be used as an approach to overcoming some of its challenges. Finally, best practices examples (Kansai University Language Learning Focused COIL, presented by Dr. Pouromid, and the UMAP-COIL Joint Program 2021 presented by IIGE Coordinator Michele Fujii) were given and the different tools and application used to further internationalization of HEIs using the COIL approach.

 

Workshop Abstract
With the growing use of online-based forms of education comes an increasing need to provide educators with practical suggestions for both the generation of new courses that may be explicitly designed to be online offerings and perhaps more commonly the integration of preexisting course content into online delivery. The latter is particularly the case with the increasingly popular uptake of COIL based approaches, and this workshop seeks to provide educators with an overview of several key principles and useful practices that can serve to enhance the intercultural and international experiences that COIL courses are often explicitly designed to afford students.

 

Drawing from our range of experiences in designing, implementing, delivering and evaluating COIL based courses and programs the IIGE team will cover a number of themes in the workshop. These include design suggestions for collaborative tasks that can be used in COIL exchanges, suggestions for the training of faculty and peers in intercultural sensitivity and related skills, coverage of strategies that can assist in the building of institutional linkages between faculty, management and university-wide administrations in order to build sustainable COIL relationships on campus, and an introduction to several useful information technology tools that are well suited for COIL courses.

 

For more information on this workshop, visit
https://siiej.org/sessions2021/workshoph/