Location: Lake Ballroom
This session includes the following five PechaKucha presentations:
Potsdam's Model for Internationalization Through Digitalization
Alexander Knoth
One part of successful COIL collaborations is the institutional arrangement in which COIL activities are framed within higher education facilities. The COIL.UP project developed an adaptive framework to embed COIL activities in a new strategic field of university development called “internationalization through digitalization”. The implementation logic follows a combined top down and bottom up approach, which is represented by three intertwined central university strategies and top-level university support (top down) as well as four fields of action (Networks, Didactics, IT-Infrastructure, Research) to arrange the internationalization of curricula (bottom up). One specific effort to spread the COIL idea is the documentation of good practices to establish an ongoing feedback loop within the project group as well as with collaborating teachers. From gaining knowledge about how COIL courses are conducted, a more precise work flow to generate contents and didactical support can be achieved.
The Experience of Being a COIL Teacher and a COIL Student
Alejandra Ortega Legaspi
During all the COIL preparing courses, we receive enough information about designing, preparing, implementing and evaluating a COIL course, but the experience of being a COIL student, the only ones that have had the opportunity to be enrolled in this kind of course, can describe the experience. I have been a COIL teacher in four different COIL courses, but I had the opportunity to be a COIL student. Now I prepare my COIL courses considering my experience as a student, where the most important thing was the conversation established with my peers and the cross-cultural experience.
Teaching Literature Across the Pacific: A Progress Report
John Shanahan, Sharon Guan
In this presentation, we describe our work over the past two years joining literature classrooms in Chicago and Shanghai as part of the "Global Learning Experience" program at DePaul. Working with the same faculty member in China twice over eighteen months, we linked both early modern drama and book history courses with shared reading assignments and exploratory prompts for synchronous and asynchronous student interactions. In both courses, students were required to present documents and research to peers abroad and conduct shared research on specified topics. The courses approached the evaluation of student work flexibly because the two sets of students had different goals from their engagement with the shared literary material: translation for the Chinese students, historical argument for the DePaul students. We show how this experiment with linked, but different, assignment goals conducted via synchronous sessions had positive pedagogical effects.
COIL at a Community College: Communicating Across Difference
Olga Aksakalova, Kyoko Toyama and Anita Baksh
This presentation focuses on the first several COIL courses offered at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, that aimed to create opportunities for students to conceptualize, experience, and effectively respond to the difference in opinion and worldview. An active form of global learning, it encourages students to ask questions, challenge assumptions (both their own and those of their peers at LaGuardia and abroad), and discover similarities where they may have learned to see differences. This way, COIL faculty take as their premise that communication is crucial to effective global community building, and they align their online practices with this premise. Our panel comprises three presentations from faculty teaching English composition and literature and Japanese. We will discuss how the use of such tools as web blogs, Skype, and 3D cameras in a video exchange can facilitate effective communication and sense of community across cultural, ideological and linguistic differences.
Beyond Online Classroom Boundaries: Intercultural Immersion in the Wild
Mirjam Hauck
The Online Intercultural Immersion (OII) pilot explored the potential of embedding Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as a virtual intercultural learning experience for language learners at the British Open University. For five weeks, volunteer students took part, alongside other speakers and learners of the target language, in a MOOC on a topic of their choice. Subsequently, they prepared an oral presentation evaluating the benefits of the experience in terms of content, interaction and perceived learning gain, and the challenges encountered and the strategies used to overcome them. A secondary aim of the pilot was to provide Open University language teachers with an opportunity to find out about tutoring as a “co-learner” and reflecting an innovative, student-centered and collaborative approach to teaching. I will report on the main insights gained from the OII drawing on concepts such as “virtual field trip” and “intercultural immersion in the wild.”
