As focus in higher education shifts to future skills such as digital and collaborative intercultural competencies, universities need to become a place for experiential learning. Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) enables teachers to incorporate these skills and learning practices into their courses, giving their students a unique, equitable and integrated international experience.

The advantages of COILs are abundantly evident, and yet institutions still struggle to expand their COIL efforts to offer international learning to all students. This workshop engages participants by presenting factors related to individual lecturers´ and institutional preparedness. By delving into concrete narratives from the COIL development process, this workshop will help participants examine distinct perspectives for digital international learning.

Expanding opportunities in COIL means tackling several key tasks, including faculty training, partnership development, organizing instructional design resources, and providing reward and recognition for the work accomplished. While each of these tasks presents significant challenges on their own, they share a common feature of relying on broader institutional preparedness and the capacity of stakeholders to engage in equitable multi-perspective development work with other partners in the COIL development process.

By harnessing contributions and perspectives from institutions and practitioners from around the globe we will tackle the issue of readiness for COIL from multiple perspectives. Participants will explore challenges such as equity in collaboration, appropriate mindsets and institutional readiness through multi-perspective groupwork.

Interested in fostering or developing international virtual collaboration at your institution? Or you just want to learn more about what COIL can offer? Then this is the workshop for you!