SPARK-COIL ERASMUS+ PROJECT

COIL is an approach to virtual exchange that interculturally and internationally links two classes from different institutions usually in higher education.

It is a learning modality that, at short-term, commonly unfolds across a 5- or 8-week period, within which a joint syllabus is co-designed and co-taught by a pair of partnered professors. 

Classes can be fully online or can be conducted in blended formats wherein the individual classes have face-to-face sessions in their respective campuses while being linked for COIL through an online feed that is supported by blended learning technology.

COIL culminates into an output that is collaboratively developed by the students and is demonstrative of their acquired knowledge from the COIL learning experience. COIL also encourages asynchronous meetings among students to further collaborate on their output as well as extend the intercultural exchange beyond the COIL classroom.

COIL can merge two classes from different disciplines and academic fields, or remain single-disciplinary. Either way, the nature of the collaboration would depend on the shared goal of the paired COIL professors.

Only rarely are completely new courses created at either of the collaborating higher education institutions. This is because COIL virtual exchange generally banks on grassroots partnerships from international linkages generated directly by the faculty members.

Hence, COIL is typically embedded as a teaching modality within existing courses and is curricular in nature. The virtual exchange model, therefore, is revenue-neutral in that participating students are enrolled, charged tuition, and awarded grades only at their home institution. The same principle applies to faculty remuneration, ensuring neutrality in compensation processes across participating institutions.

The term COIL or Collaborative Online International Learning was coined by Jon Rubin in 2006 when the State University of New York (SUNY) System administration, in partnership with SUNY Purchase College, agreed to fund a new center devoted to this format of online exchange, which Rubin and his colleagues had been practicing since at least 2002. 

Mr. Jon Rubin, also developed the COIL Connect website designed to be a site where institutions, both new to and experienced with COIL VE, could share data, connect, and develop collaborations. The site gathered important COIL data from the institutions that registered, which would show the authors if and how the pandemic was changing the field. The site was launched publicly in February 2021 and has provided a wealth of data that is shared throughout Rubin’s recently published book on COIL.

Rubin, J., & Guth, S. (Eds.). (2022). The Guide to COIL Virtual Exchange: Implementing, Growing, and Sustaining Collaborative Online International Learning. Routledge.