ACE VE/COIL Transformation: Virtual Poster Showcase (VPS)

Context/ Purpose: In 2020, university students around the globe experienced the diverse effects of COVID-19. Two interdisciplinary classes – at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York and Kumamoto University in Japan – partnered to undertake an academic and interpersonal examination of this unprecedented situation. The purpose of the project was to promote critical reading and critical thinking skills among students, while providing an academically and culturally diverse environment in which discussion and reflection provided opportunities for growth in interdisciplinary and intercultural understanding.

Methods: The COIL module was built upon an established relationship between the two institutions, and utilized a variety of techniques, including synchronous and asynchronous interactions, student video exchanges, and shared web-based readings and media. Students produced videos using Flipgrid that were based on four themes: personal stories, politics and government, educational policies, and culture. Approximately fifty students, divided into small groups, each created four videos and responded to their peers’ contributions. The U.S. and Japanese groups also met on Zoom several times, where they had face-to-face discussions about the course material.

Results: Preliminary results showed benefits to students in three or four areas: First, students in both groups demonstrated a higher understanding of the commonalities and differences in the partner country’s responses to COVID-19, as seen through social scientific lenses (i.e., political science, history, sociology, economics and anthropology). Second, students gained insight into perspectives of each other’s culture and worldviews through readings and direct interactions. Third, this is the second COIL module that the College of Staten Island and Kumamoto University have conducted, and the instructors’ previous experiences (with the support of an instructional designer) shed light on best practices in telecollaboration. Finally, the two groups gained interpersonal and intercultural connections both within their own classes and among their partnered peers.

Interpretation: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced institutions of higher education to rethink many aspects of internationalization and the global classroom. As practitioners with years of experience in telecollaboration, the instructors found the COIL partnership to be a “silver lining” of the pandemic. Students learned together, shared common challenges created by the situation, and respectfully contrasted each other’s responses through multi-faceted lenses.

Conclusion: While COIL has a long history of building bridges among global institutions, its utility during 2020 was unparalleled. The course’s content allowed students to learn about their peers in another country, to share scholarly resources on international institutions and practices, and to reflect upon themselves as global citizens facing a common public health adversary.

Jane Marcus-Delgado, Valeria Belmonti, Lander Sims

1. College of Staten Island, CUNY (USA); 2. College of Staten Island, CUNY (USA); 3. Kumamoto University (Japan)

In the COIL collaboration between our English Language class in Japan and Intermediate Japanese I class in New York, our primary goal was to shift from correcting students’ work to peer-led reviews. By using seven years of observation and the Social/Cognitive Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977) as a framework, we aimed to increase student’s engagement and awareness of their native language and the language they are learning. We hoped that being a consultant in their native language would give students the sense of being a teacher/expert, which would build their self-confidence and promote their learning process.

In Spring 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, we asked students to write an essay in both English and Japanese about compassion through photographs titled: “Coronavirus and its impact on people’s lives” in Matsumoto, Japan and New York, U.S. from what they experience and observed in their community. Students were then asked to comment on their partner’s grammar and/or use of expressions, ask questions for clarification, and present recommendations for further writing and presentation of photos.

We observed that the peer critiquing exercises promoted the students’ sense of true collaboration, increased their time management and negotiation skills, cultural sensitivity, and their sense of responsibility towards the course and their partners. Furthermore, with the help of the “peer critiquing” process, students were no longer simply learning a language, but they were learning to become global citizens and social leaders.

Kyoko M. Toyama <KYOKOT@lagcc.cuny.edu>

1. Matsumoto University/Matsusho Junior College (Japan), Department of Management Information; 2. LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York (USA), Department of Education and Language Acquisition and Department of Counseling

peer assessment / learning communities / social learning

In the time of global pandemic, COIL plays a more significant role than ever, not only to maintain the opportunities of international learning but also to develop it even further. Thanks to the preexisting, sustainable COIL partnership between Nanzan University (NU) and the University of North Georgia (UNG), students from both institutions have been able to take part in a series of meaningful learning opportunities despite the cancellations of study abroad programs. This poster will illustrate one such case, called the Momiji Project, and demonstrate how COIL stimulated their motivation for language and cultural learning in the challenging times. The Language and Society course at NU and Intermediate-Advanced Japanese I at UNG collaborated for five weeks. The project comprised (1) NU-cantered, English-based activities on the topic of corporate Englishnization and (2) UNG-centered, Japanese based activities about Japanese culture, both of which took place concurrently on two different platforms. Some activities were designed to be conducted individually while others were to be done collaboratively in transpacific COIL groups. Student reflections suggested this project contributed to stimulating their language learning motivation further, or reviving or maintaining it for those who were temporarily discouraged due to the cancellation of study abroad programs in the semester the project was conducted. Not only did this project provide meaningful, international learning with students, it also encouraged them to keep their learning motivation in general. This case suggests that COIL serves as a highly sustainable method of international learning for its invulnerability to limited mobility.

Tomoe Nishio

1. University of North Georgia (USA); 2. Nanzan University (Japan)

<1> Purpose: This presentation describes the experiences of undergraduate students, pre-service social studies teachers, as they participated in a COIL project. Researchers -Katsuki UMEDA (Chiba University, Japan) and Cory CALLAHAN (University of Alabama, US)- centered the project round helping students further develop civic competence as it relates to international and global education, which was operationalized as Interconnectedness, Cosmopolitanism, and Inquiry into Global Issues. <2> Methods: Our COIL project is a five-week, collaborative, and online international experience for pre-service social studies teachers. We divided 60 students into 10 groups. Each group consists 3-5 CU and 2-3 UA students. They explored similarities in social studies education between the two nations; refined their understanding of international and global education; and shared ideas for a wise-practice social studies activity for secondary students in both nations. The researchers employed a type of convergent mixed-methods design; they collected both quantitative and qualitative data. <3> Results: Both data clearly shows that our COIL program encourage all students to develop Civic Competence for International and Global Education. Almost all students could describe at least two principles and a few could describe all three. It was also encouraging that several students claimed that they personally grew in their preparedness as world-citizens and offered convincing supporting evidence. Also, five weeks is too short to better understand and implement the lessons learned from this project. Additional international and global experiences could be added over an increased duration. We will strive to make better program. ---------- You can also read more results of our work in the Journal of International Social Studies, v. 11, n. 1, 2021 - https://www.iajiss.org/index.php/iajiss/article/view/625 - The article is open access and free to view.

Katsuki UMEDA <umeda@faculty.chiba-u.jp>

1. Chiba University (JAPAN), Faculty of Education, Department of Social Studies Education; 2. The University of Alabama (USA), College of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction

Building upon audiovisual data collected from COIL interactions between Kansai University and its partner institutions from the US, this research introduces a less explored approach in the evaluation of COIL impacts. While former research on COIL has largely depended on student surveys and self-reports as well as quantification of student competencies through psychometric tests, the present study has taken a social interaction approach to investigate how students benefit from COIL. Rather than focusing on the outcome of COIL exchanges, the social interaction approach is primarily concerned with how competencies develop over time. In this study, we have tracked the development in our students’ interactional competence. More specifically, we have focused on the changes in our students’ listenership behavior. Using conversation analysis as our methodological framework, we found that our students were able to use more complex interactional resources to demonstrate listenership after being exposed to meaning-focused and goal-oriented interactions in a COIL program. The preliminary results of our study suggested that while prior to the COIL claims of listenership were either non-existent or made passively through uttering short response tokens, after the COIL project, listenership was demonstrated through more complex interactional resources. For instance, our students became able to initiate and complete collaborative turns, in which speakers demonstrate their attentive listenership through completing other speakers’ unfinished utterances in a way that the completion is semantically and morpho-syntactically aligned with the preceding unfinished turn. The presence of such attentive listeners able to demonstrate listenership contributes to how the interaction unfolds overall.

Sajjad Pouromid <pouromid@kansai-u.ac.jp>

1-5. Kansai University (Japan), Institute for Innovative Global Education

Interactional competence, Conversation analysis, Listenership, Language learning focused COIL

To narrate the journey of a group of researchers when contacting VE/COIL partners towards the exploration of interinstitutional and collaborative research projects. The initiative of this group of researchers to outreach researchers of a VE/COIL partner institution provoked insights of this experience which may encourage and lead other researchers onto their own journeys to finding collaborative research opportunities with their partner universities. Five-open-ended questions were employed to collect the researchers’ reflections on their experience of exploring a prospective collaborative research project. Questions were available in the language of the researchers (Spanish and English) and covered four areas. The analysis of the responses followed a thematic analysis approach aiming to seek emerging themes. Revisiting the pathway, we discovered five stages that were part of the researchers’ journey when exploring collaborative research opportunities with other COIL partners. Also, the results offered insights into four main areas related to communication and interactions, fears and barriers, perceived benefits, and recommendations. Having the opportunity to interact with researchers of partner universities was an unexpected benefit that derived from being part of a VE/COIL group. The experience broadened the views of both parties. Furthermore, the intercultural exchange allowed to understand the shared and non-shared realities of the researchers in two different countries and institutions which permitted the provision of feedback to the research proposal from another cultural angle. Virtual interaction with researchers from other VE/COIL universities in interdisciplinary research projects is proposed to enhance the internationalization of HEIs which belong to the expanding VE/COIL community.

Katherine Salvador-Cisneros, Cindy Bolaños-Mendoza <ksalvado@espol.edu.ec>

1. ESPOL Polytechnic University (ECUADOR), Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities; 2. ESPOL Polytechnic University (ECUADOR), Center of Educational Research and Services. Campus Gustavo Galindo, Guayaquil, Ecuador

Collaborative research, COIL initiative, higher education, internationalization, international partnership

Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) activities provide the best scenario to live a multicultural experience. In 2019, the University of Texas (UT-Austin) in the USA, Universidad Arturo Michelena (UAM) from Venezuela, and Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) in Ecuador partnered to work together in a COIL initiative. The goal was to foster intercultural collaboration by encouraging students to communicate, learn from international peers and provide feedback. Twenty-one were from UT-Austin taking a Capstone course, twenty-seven first-year students from ESPOL taking a problem resolution course, and six from UAM at a master's level participated. There were challenges to overcome in the planning phase, such as language barriers, different academic levels and subjects, courses schedules, diversity in student groups, and limitations to internet access. During the execution phase, students participated in group-building activities to get to know each other. Then, they posted videos describing their research projects, while peers from the other two universities provided feedback. Finally, students reflected through an individual written evaluation of the collaborative experience.  Results showed an overall satisfaction of the experience, they showed greater awareness of bias in the language when referring to other countries, most of the Spanish speaking students, prepared videos and provided feedback in English. Graduate students liked providing feedback, because they felt like tutors. In conclusion, universities should provide support to include COIL initiatives. It is recommended to plan activities with enough time to build rapport before collaborating on graded work. It is essential to provide support to students for activities. Finally, when working with students from different regions, teachers should provide cultural facts about what to expect/to do when interacting with people from other cultures; thus, they can feel more comfortable working together.

Sharon Guaman-Quintanilla

1. Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral (ESPOL), i3lab Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center (Ecuador); 2. University of Texas – Austin (USA), College of Liberal Arts; 3. ESPOL, Center of Educational Research and Services; 4. ESPOL, International Relations

COIL, metacognitive process, inter-cultural collaboration, barriers in online education, diverse teams

In the context of pervasive threats to democracy and human rights on a global scale, three university instructors from Ecuador, the United States, and Venezuela developed in 2020 a collaborative online international curriculum on comparative modes of democratic government and human rights praxis that fostered intercultural competence and critical citizenship. By comparing entry and exit surveys, instructors noted a 12% increase in students’ willingness to interact with people of a different culture. Surveys also showed a 20% reduction in the perception of language as a barrier to cross-cultural interaction. The institutions will repeat the course with improvements in 2021.

Marbelis Cedeño, David Inczauskis, Lorena Piedra

1. Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Venezuela); 2. Xavier University; 3. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador

COIL, Democracy, Human Rights, Spanish, Teaching

The paper presents the experience of a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) program carried out among a course of Epidemiology of the medical career of the San Francisco de Quito University, the (course title) of the Master in Public Policies of Florida International University, and the Public Opinion course of the Bachelor of Social Communication at the Monteavila University, from February to April 2019, where 17 students participated. The pedagogical strategy was directed to analyzing a public health problem to present results from the epidemiological, communicational, and public policy aspects. The teachers (Iván Sisa -USFQ-, Cristina Rodríguez Acosta -FIU-, Mariana Bacalao-UMA-) agreed to analyze the Zika outbreak in Ecuador, USA, and Venezuela from 2015 to 2019; to promote intercultural and interdisciplinary learning among students of different careers and academic degrees. The methodology used began with the planning of the teaching team, which divided the work into three moments: (1) Beginning: aimed at the cultural socialization of the students; (2) Development of learning objectives and presentation of academic products applying problem-based learning and; (3) Evaluation of the activities carried out. Synchronous and asynchronous communication was used between students and face-to-face classes with the teachers of each subject. The results for each phase were the following: (1) information from the cultural mapping survey, a video presentation of each team by country; (2) products of the application of interdisciplinary knowledge: graphs with comparative analysis of the incidence of Zika in the three countries during the selected period; analysis of the educational-communication strategies implemented in Ecuador, USA and Venezuela to deal with the Zika outbreak in the years 2015-2019 and; mapping of the key actors and public policies applied by the three countries to address the epidemiological outbreak during the specified period. At the end of the experience, each student evaluated it and presented the lessons learned in a plenary activity.

Mariana Bacalao

1. Universidad Monteavila (Venezuela); 2. Universidad Monteavila (Venezuela); 3. Florida International University (USA); 4. Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador)

Zika, Interdisciplinary analysis, global health, outbreak, interdisciplinary learning, intercultural, cultural socialization,