Best Practices: Collaborative Online International Learning, The SUNY COIL Center and Kansai University

The SUNY (State University of New York) COIL Center has led the way in developing programs that connect SUNY faculty and students with their international partners through co-taught online learning environments. In the COIL model, students from different countries enroll in shared courses, with faculty from each institution co-teaching and managing coursework. The result is a co-equal team-taught learning environment that emphasizes experiential and collaborative student learning.

In 2014, Kansai University became the first Japanese COIL partner, introducing three types of COIL courses with SUNY campuses and other COIL partners worldwide. Both Kansai and the COIL Center see such courses as a key element in enhancing student mobility, facilitating language practice and creating connections that spur students to travel and that endure long after such travel occurs.

New Directions and Innovations

As discussed throughout this RoadMap, strategic partnerships provide a rich matrix for U.S. and Japanese colleges and universities to collaborate in what is emerging as a new era in advancing knowledge and preparing students for a globalizing world.

This section presents some of the promising ideas and approaches surfacing through this increased collaboration, with special attention to those that enhance the ability of Japanese and U.S. students to spend time in each other’s countries.

Strategic partnerships and student mobility

What follows is just a sampling of the ways in which strategic partnerships are opening U.S.-Japanese engagement to new students, new disciplines, and new institutions. There are many others, and we hope more will appear on the RoadMap in the future. This is a time of great creativity and connection.

The approaches presented in this section testify to the power of strategic partnerships to provide mutual benefit, draw in new participants, and generate new activities over time. They also testify to the ways in which partners develop a deep understanding of each other, leading to programs targeted to their specific interests, disciplines, and needs.

The results are short-term programs with the kind of impact formerly found only in long-term ones, and long-term programs that reach new depths; programs that ramify across each partner institution, drawing in new faculty and students; programs that lead to greater knowledge and connectivity between the United States and Japan.

This is the moment for innovation

The list of colleges and universities developing such programs is long and growing. The resulting initiatives reflect the rationale and reasoning given in the Why Partnerships part of the RoadMap, the principles of good practice found in Partnership Basics, and the solutions to recurrent difficulties discussed in Challenges.

These programs also reflect the current moment of innovation and new direction, supported by national initiatives on both sides. Tobitate, for example, encourages Japanese students to study overseas. On the institutional level, with the Global 30 initiative of 2009, Re-Inventing Japan in 2011, Go Global Japan in 2012, and Top Global Universities in 2014, the Japanese government has also increasingly supported its universities to pursue robust forms of internationalization. For more information, see Top Global University Initiative (plus Global 30 and Go Global Japan).

In like manner, Generation Study Abroad is prompting increased mobility by U.S. students. And funding for institutional internationalization, long provided by the U.S. Department of Education, the Fulbright-Hays Act, and the Bureau of Cultural and Educational Affairs in the U.S. Department of State, was given an overall framework when the Department of Education formulated its first fully articulated international education strategy for the United States in 2012.

This atmosphere has led to the array of innovative student-centered programs that populate this section of the RoadMap, as well as the descriptions given elsewhere for the NanoJapan, Global Leadership Fellows, and Campus-in-Campus programs.

There is much to consider and emulate in the new programs that are emerging. Internships combine with classroom learning. Study abroad is aligning with core curricula. And, as in the Best Practice highlighted on this page, interactive information technology is being put to new uses. It is an exciting time.

Topics covered

Next up: The Many Forms of Experiential Learning »