General description of the project:
To increase educational access and success for the Hispanic population in the United States of America, under Title III and Title V of the Higher Education Act of 1965, Higher Education Institutions (HEI), with at least 25% of the student Hispanic population, were designated as Hispanic Serving Institutions (HIS). Today, HSIs represent 16% of all higher education institutions in the country and serve 65% of all Hispanic students.
Nowadays, HEIs, including HSI focus on internationalizing their curricula and ensuring that their students acquire intercultural capabilities that allow them to function as global citizens and global professionals.
The Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) model is an innovative strategy that allows professors to internationalize the curricula, by providing students opportunities to learn and relate with international peers in multicultural virtual environments, with low or even no additional cost to tuition.
This paper presents a strategy that was implemented in the College of Business and Entrepreneurship in a HIS, to offer a joint course with a European University, for the internationalization of the curricula.
Qualitative research by surveying students allows us to gather relevant information on their approaches to managing multicultural contexts as a result of taking part in a virtual international classroom.
Examples or evidence that shows success
COIL courses provide teaching and learning experiences across countries/continents, across disciplines, and often expose participants to different home languages and cultures using a variety of materials, activities, and assessments.
A brief summary of the participant students at the end of the joint course is as follows:
• The COIL course is interesting since they are international students and it’s great to work with them.
• I really enjoyed the COIL, it was fun!
• Successful experience getting to work with students in a foreign country.
• It was a great experience I learned a lot.
• It has helped me gain experience in working with people with different cultural views and practices.
• Different, new, challenging, and cool.
• Learning about the management world.
The cost-effectiveness of the initiative
The COIL model could be one cost-effective solution for universities to internationalize curricula, develop new partnerships globally, and provide their students with international learning opportunities and global competencies. COIL courses use technology innovatively to foster collaboration between faculty and students in partner institutions worldwide, and to facilitate student learning (the SUNY COIL Center, n.d.). As campuses systematically update classroom technology to include virtual exchange communication tools, usually, no additional technology is required. Instead, existing hardware and software available on the partner campuses as well as technologies housed in the instructors’ and students’ homes/dorms are used. Thus, when taking a COIL course, students do not need to make a huge commitment financially or in terms of time, compared to their peers who study abroad (Fowler, Pearlman, LeSavoy, & Hemphill, 2014). Instead, the students take the course in their current institution and use existing networking technology for communication and collaboration, which adds no additional cost (Zhang & Pearlman, 2017).