COIL - Collaborative Online International Learning
A good-practice example for social work education at the University of Applied Sciences,
JOANNEUM
Narration:
Mag. Karen Meixner
Mag. Erika D. Pernold
Mag. Monika Altenreiter
Video:
Martin A. Gutzelnig, M.A.
COIL: collaborative online international learning.
A good-practice example for social work education at the University of Applied Sciences,
JOANNEUM
Through our project “COIL in social work education” we have created a collaborative international
online learning experience which served to foster student motivation and involvement while at the
same time providing a very different learning setting from other classes at the University of Applied
Sciences (UAS) FH JOANNEUM, Graz.
Since, typically, an UAS education involves compulsory attendance, students spend their days walking from one lecture or seminar to the next. For this reason, we wanted to provide a change in setting which could offer a different perspective as well as a new challenge. We conducted our COIL classroom in the third semester seeing as the newness of the university experience has somewhat worn off by this time, life at the UAS has become routine and students’ motivation tends to wane.
An opportunity presented itself in the form of a new ERASMUS partner of the UAS JOANNEUM, the
University of Malmö. Our Swedish colleague had already started to experiment in this field and we
were keen to get on board. Having consulted with students first, we found that their interest in the
project idea was high, their curiosity was aroused (as was ours), and they would welcome the
opportunity to work virtually with international colleagues.
Our project “International Remote Classrooms in Social Work and Social Sciences” was based on the idea that virtual platforms are widespread as repositories of knowledge, for collaborative teaching and remote learning. The department of social work at the UAS JOANNEUM and, respectively that of Malmö University, created and set up an international shared online classroom. This online classroom was of immediate value to the students and professionals directly involved and was also recorded to create online material for future use with the potential of being at the disposal of a wider audience. Since the Malmö classroom consisted of students with different cultural and professional social science backgrounds, we managed to have altogether 6 different nationalities on board this project. In light of current environmental developments and striving for sustainability, an endeavor like this promotes internationalization and interdisciplinary exchange without having to travel to far-away destinations while at the same time ensuring state-of-the-art education across cultures.
Our idea was twofold: firstly, to enable synchronous remote classroom participation. This was realized using the video platform “Zoom”. We chose this particular platform because of its reliable
performance, the option of recording the classroom session and because of the fact that it runs
smoothly both on Mac systems and Windows’ installations. Secondly, to create a valuable resource to be “recycled” later in various forms. The resulting video sequences are used as asynchronous input ensuring our zoom session was not just a ‘one-shot game’ but a didactic tool for future use in various educational contexts.
In our presentation, we will outline the collaborative work and preparation between the two
universities that led to the joint international remote classroom Zoom session. We will discuss the
applied methods (technological and didactic) before presenting the results of the ‘joint international
classroom’ firstly from the student perspective (on the basis of anonymous student evaluations
completed after the session) and secondly from an educator perspective. Our next step in this project was to utilize different sequences of the recording for deeper analysis of content as well as to showcase international voices.
We will emphasize what worked well in practice, where students benefited from this experience and
which advantages over a conventional classroom setting were gained due to the technology and
methods implemented. Furthermore, we will examine problems that arose and difficulties that could
have been avoided.
At the end of our presentation we will look to the future and using our experience suggest improved
preparation methods for both didactic approaches and technology used so that the project becomes
even more student-centered and engaging.
authors: Monika Altenreiter, Karen Meixner, Erika Pernold, Martin Gutzelnig
FH JOANNEUM – University of Applied Sciences Graz