IIGE is honored to be part of American Council on Education (ACE) Rapid Response Virtual Exchange/COIL Transformation Lab: U.S.-Japan. This three-week training aim to equip higher education institutions in the global pandemic time where physical mobility has been suspended for the foreseeable future. It is crucial for the virtual exchange community to strategize effective ways to equip institutions with the skills and resources to adapt their physical education or academic exchange program into quality assured, high impact VE/COIL programs.
IIGE, VE/COIL community for higher education institutions in Japan, is assisting with a three-week online professional development course for selected paired institutions to get started on their VE/COIL projects. In addition to the online content, a weekly check in via a video conferencing app is offered for additional team mentoring.
The participants, consisting of 28 institutions (14 Japanese universities and 14 US universities), have been going through the three-week bilingual training provided on ImmerseU, which is an LMS platform for COIL that has been developed by IIGE and Class2Class (https://class2class.com/).

 

 

 

 

In the first week of the training, the participants were asked to work with their partner institution to identify the type of their COIL course design as well as to create simulative activities that could be assigned to the students of the course. During this week’s training, the trainees were able to analyze the partner’s course and think about potential activities that could be incorporated in their future COIL course.
In the 2nd week of the training, the participants were asked to create tasks for both information exchange and collaboration work stage by sharing each other’s course information and discussing potential collaboration projects. This has provided the institutions an opportunity to exchange further interaction, which is essential to a successful COIL collaboration.
The training will continue until the first week of August and the participants will have the last check-in session with IIGE at the end of the training.
If you would like to know more about U.S.-Japan COIL initiative, please visit https://www.acenet.edu/Programs-Services/Pages/Communities/US-Japan-COIL-Initiative.aspx.