How COIL Virtual Exchange Can Foster Relationships and Sustain Mutually Beneficial Partnerships
Collaborations across U.S. and Indian higher education are at an all-time high. This fall, the Open Doors 2024 Report on International Educational Exchange found that India returned to the leading place of origin for foreign students studying in the US, a spot it previously held in 2008-09. Ready to respond to market demands, higher education institutions in both countries are creating, renewing, and expanding partnerships in hopes of achieving complementary, mutually reinforcing goals. But to fully actualize these goals, partnerships and supporting activities must be firmly grounded in equity and sustainability.
Think of the partnership as a tree: The partnership agreement is the trunk, and joint activities—such as student and faculty mobility, research, degree programs, and community engagement— are its branches. The tree’s roots, which are essential for the partnership’s growth and resilience, are equitable relationships between faculty, staff, and students. The roots of higher education partnerships are formed when faculty and students engage in peer-to-peer, project-based activities that foster mutual understanding and relationship building. Branches flourish when successful partners continuously seek new ways to exchange and produce knowledge together.
But one major challenge remains: how do institutions develop substantive relationships among faculty, staff, and students when they’re thousands of miles away? That is where Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) virtual exchanges come in. COIL virtual exchange is usually defined as learning experiences that (Dietrich and Besana, 2024):
- Are embedded in existing, credit-bearing courses or modules in tertiary education programs
- Are designed and implemented by the instructors who are teaching the courses involved in the experience
- Are mediated using technology
- Involve learners who are geographically separated and/or coming from different cultural settings
- Implement multiple opportunities for sustained communication and/or collaboration among learners
- Have clearly identified learning outcomes that include explicit outcomes around intercultural awareness and/or competency and outcomes related to the content of the courses involved, and
- Are focused on collaborative projects conducted by learners in mixed groups.
The very nature of COIL virtual exchange asks faculty and students to engage in meaningful dialogue, with multiple opportunities to share vulnerabilities and reciprocal strengths, resulting in deep, sustained personal and professional relationships. COIL virtual exchange, by design, allows these relationships to develop in an inclusive and equitable manner, through intentional strategies aimed at minimizing power imbalances and colonial approaches to partnerships (Satar, 2021). These relationships that are developed, nurtured, and grounded in common daily pedagogical practice, are what we have experienced for over a decade as the strongest roots for bilateral and multilateral institutional partnerships.
U.S. and Indian institutions make ideal COIL virtual exchange partners. Both countries have a strong entrepreneurial spirit that can inspire creative applied COIL projects and outcomes. English is the common lingua franca, giving faculty and students greater access to deeper differences in culture and perspective. Indian partners value interdisciplinarity and U.S. institutions gain access to new ways of knowing through Indian traditional knowledge systems. An example of a COIL that capitalized on these complementary strengths comes from Florida International University, where Nicki Fraser, Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Public Administration, partnered with Sunita Singh-Sengupta, former dean of business at the University of Delhi. Their COIL explored applications of the Hindu concept Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (“the world is one family”) to the management of global cities. The partners subsequently branched out to pursue other opportunities: Singh-Sengupta invited Fraser to co-chair the 2020 conference of her foundation, Integrating Spirituality and Organisational Leadership, and the two worked with students to co-author and present several research articles. At DePaul University, students in Dr. Nila Ginger Hoffman’s anthropology class worked with Symbiosis International University (SIU) students in Dr. Shweta Despande’s class to conduct a comparative analysis of dating and marriage practices among the urban middle classes in the two countries. The two institutions then proceeded to co-organize five yearly editions of an International Gender Conference at SIU, continuing the conversations on gender roles through multiple lenses.
Traditional approaches to bilateral partnerships often prioritize joint research projects and the physical mobility of students and faculty. These activities typically engage only a few members of one or both academic communities, further constraining equity and sustainability by scarcity and imbalances in partners’ financial resources. U.S. and Indian leaders seeking strategies to grow robust, multi-faceted, long-term alliances with their partners should make COIL virtual exchange their strategic first step. The seeds of COIL virtual exchanges will germinate an intricate network of roots for the partnership tree to bear hardy, well-balanced internationalization fruit for years to come.
Dietrich, Amelia, and GianMario Besana. “Defining Digital Internationalization.” Digital Internationalization in Higher Education. Routledge 15-28, 2024.
Satar, Müge, ed. Virtual exchange: Towards digital equity in internationalisation. Research-publishing. net, 2021.