Developing Collaborative Online
International Courses
Pre-Conference Workshop
Presenters:
Jon Rubin, Anthony (Tony) Lemieux, and Melanie Wilson
Center of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL)
State University Of New York (SUNY)
Today’s Agenda
Introductions
 COIL: Brief History
 Live from NY: Faculty experience of COIL:
course overview (Virtual Presentation)
 Important concepts and use of Guide (handout)
 5-10 minute Break
 Hands on Activity – role play
 Next Steps

Overview of Global Networking for
COIL

Pillars of support
 Partnerships, Policies and Pedagogies

Cross Cultural Collaboration
 Establishing and retaining equity between
partners
 Considerations for online collaboration

Faculty Guide for Collaborative Online
International Learning
5 minute Break
Role Playing Activity – Part 1

Select a partner a role (provided)

From the perspective of your 'character'
and referring to the information in the guide
and the questions within the tables, work
with your partner to identify an issue that
may arise (such as time, language,
technology, course content, assessment
etc.)

For each issue, negotiate an agreement.

Write your final decision for each issue with
how you will proceed on a Post It notes.
Role Playing Activity – Part 2
Presentation (5 minutes each team)

Using your Post Its, place your issues
and decisions on the wall, and jointly
present the decisions made for each
issue.
Team 1: Role Description

Role A:
US Faculty member at a mid-size university in rural Wisconsin. Your university
has many international partnerships through university consortia, but you like to
work below the radar. You chose this partner because you feel that his students'
experience and interpretation of the course content will be very different from that
of your students. This is not the first time you have done this kind of
collaboration, but it is the first time with this partner and with this specific course.
Your institution uses Blackboard, but you hate using it, even though your fairly
competent in the LMS. You prefer to use free tools on the Internet to keep the
administration outside of your collaboration.

Role B
You are an international faculty member that heard about the possible
collaboration at a conference. You don't know this professor well, but have read
their publications and think highly of their contribution to the scholarship in your
field. You are currently at a state-run university with limited resources located in
Eastern Europe, and you think this collaboration could be very important for your
country and US relations, but you worry that your dean will not understand its
value. You have already decided that you will document your experience in
hopes that further discussions with your superiors will help students get more
access to online resources for class. Your students meet with you face-to-face
and your institution uses Moodle mainly as a repository for the course syllabus,
required texts and.a place to submit papers, but you wish it were used more
robustly.
Team 2: Role description


Role A
You are an assistant professor of engineering at a large world-renowned university in the
North Eastern US. You have just received a grant to help develop cultural situatedness in
your Civil Engineering Design course. Because of the density of the material to be covered,
you have decided that you only want to add a module or two to the course to specifically
address the cultural situatedness of the analysis of design documents, but given that this is a
key component of success for any design job in another culture you want give it precedence.
You have heard about collaborative online international learning, and would like to collaborate
with an international partner whose culture has very different design document criteria. Your
school uses Blackboard and you are at ease with technology. You will also be up for tenure
next year and would like to generate a paper from this exercise, but are also concerned that a
bad outcome from this initiative could negatively affect your tenure.
Role B
You are a full professor of civil engineering and departmental chair at a large university in
India. You would like to respond to student's requests to have more instruction on how to
work in a US setting as many of your graduates get jobs with companies based in the US.
You have heard about collaborative online learning from a colleague and recently met a
professor (your partner) at a conference in Oslo that had an interesting project and was
looking for partners. You have decided that as an experienced professor you should try a
collaboration first before asking faculty in your department to engage in this modality. You
teach graduate students and think this may be just what they are looking for. Your university
uses a homegrown learning management system and has internet access on campus. You
are familiar with the LMS, but let the IT manage the technology. Students mostly are
connected to the Internet at home but it is very expensive. They come in once a week so you
feel that this time can be used for collaboration.
Team 3: Role Description

Role A
You are a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at a small women-only Ivy League US
university and just got your first course to teach on 'Images of women' next semester. It
is an undergraduate course and you are excited about how to make this a memorable
experience for students. You have a friend who graduated a year before you, who
currently teaches in the Caribbean, with whom you often discussed the potential to
collaborate online if one or the other traveled to another country. You have just sent an
email to your friend and hope that you will be able to collaborate, although you have
never taught an online course before.

Role B
You have just received an email from a friend at the university from which you recently
graduated. She is teaching a course on 'Images of Women' and would like to
collaborate next semester. You teach an introduction to the humanities course at a
community college in the Caribbean as well as supervise students in the teacher
preparation program. Resources are hard to come by and students come from a
diverse background. All are very motivated but often have jobs to support their
education. You think this could be a great opportunity but are not sure how you could
manage it, especially as you only used an LMS as a student in college and your friend's
course is so different from yours. You are still new to the school but think that a
collaboration would be positively received. You decide to speak to your friend and
discuss specifics.
Team 4: Role Description

Role A:
You are a TOEFL instructor with students mostly from Latin America,
and you would like to prepare your students for work outside of the US.
You have a colleague currently teaching at a university in South Korea,
and you have asked to collaborate with her students who are also
learning English. She has agreed, but neither of you has taught
language online, although you have taught an English comp course
online, so you both must work out a methodology and a common area
of discourse for the students.

Role B
You are a ESL teacher in S. Korea and a previous colleague currently
working in the US has contacted you about a potential collaboration.
Your students use technology frequently, accessing podcasts and
watching movies and TV shows available on the Internet. You are
pleased abut this collaboration because you have wanted to develop
an immersion module and this collaboration has the potential of linking
your colleague’s students with yours. You will need to OK this with your
Dean who is rather conservative, but wants to develop a student
exchange program with an American university.
Team 5: Role Description

Role A:
You are teaching a graduate seminar at a mid-size university in Florida
(EST) preparing students for academic journal collaborative writing.
You have a colleague who teaches a similar course in British Columbia,
Canada (PST) and you have both decided that you will partner your
students to collaborate and write an opinion piece. You think that
having students additionally reflect on their experiences by keeping a
journal of the collaboration would be a deep learning experience. You
are both quite comfortable with technology, and would like to use free
internet tools for the collaboration.

Role B:
You are teaching a graduate seminar in British Columbia, Canada and
you have a colleague at a university in Florida who would like to
collaborate by partnering your students to collaborate and write an
opinion piece. You have very rigid assessment requirements at your
school, and you need to make sure that this collaboration can be
graded. You are both quite comfortable with technology, and though
your partner would like to use free internet tools for the collaboration,
your school uses Blackboard and has Elluminate (for web
conferencing) and a robust instructional design team that could
potentially help set up this collaboration.
Team 6: Role Description

Role A:
You are an instructional designer at a Midwestern university that uses
Blackboard, and has a well developed distance learning program. You have just
attended a SLOAN-C session on collaborative online learning and are excited
about encouraging faculty on your campus to engage in this kind of teaching and
learning. You know other instructional designers in Europe and Latin America
and have decided to speak to your director to develop an information session for
faculty, but decide to contact your international colleagues by email first to get
their response. What would you tell them and what questions might you pose?

Role B:
You are an instructional designer at a moderate-sized technical college in
Germany and have recently gotten excited about about the Erasmus student
mobility programs which your school, unfortunately has not participated in
extensively. Your campus uses Moodle, but primarily to support face-to-face and
hybrid courses. You receive an email from a colleague in the States who is very
excited about developing online collaborations and who wants your input about
this idea and asks if you can speak to your dean and to some faculty to see if
they would be interested. You have some questions to ask your American
colleague first, before you engage your German colleagues. What would these
be?
Team 7: Role Description

Role A:
You are an adjunct professor at a private online US university teaching digital
animation. Your students work in a proprietary LMS that has file sharing, web
conferencing, and the typical asynchronous discussion boards. You have small cohorts
of no more than 12 students, and you need to develop a module on cultural adaptation
of cartoons. A colleague (also at your online university but at the Mexico-satellite
campus) teaches Spanish translation and you think that this could be an interesting
collaboration of students (where her students work with your students to develop
culturally relevant Spanish-translated animations). You know you will need to contact
an instructional designer for some ideas on how this could be done.

Role B
You are an instructional designer at a large private online university with satellite
campuses in 5 countries, and students from all over the world. You have just been
contacted by an instructor who wants to collaborate with another colleague in another
discipline to have students work in teams. You have almost unlimited financial
resources when it comes to course development, however, these two cohorts of
students are very different in that they pay different fees and the satellite campus has
significantly less resources available. You have an online meeting organized with both
faculty, and recently received a ‘Faculty guide for online international course
development’, and have decided to use it to help guide the conversation during this
meeting. You know the idea sounds good, but there may be additional hurdles that the
instructors likely have not thought about.
Role Playing Activity: Questions

Did one partner's needs outweigh the
other? and did your negotiated
agreement favour one partner more than
the other?

Why do you think this did (or did not)
occur?

Upon reflection, how would you
approach the decision making process
differently, if at all?
Activity Wrap up
What trends do we see in the issues that
arose?
 How does the concept of inequitable
positions of power within partnerships
impact your thinking of the negotiation
process?
 What did you take away from exercise?
 Are there any questions/ specific issues
related to your ‘real life’ engagement in
COIL?

SUNY COIL Center 2011 Conference

Collaboration and Technology in
International Online Learning
Environments : Constructing a New
Paradigm
When? March 31-April 1, 2011
 Where? SUNY Global Center, 116 E. 55th
St. New York, NY
 Register?: Visit www.suny.edu/global/coil

NEH Institute for Globally Networked
Learning in The Humanities.



This 3 year project aimed at supporting and
expanding globally networked learning
Consists of discipline specific workshops,
online community of practice, and capstone
conference in 2013.
Applications are encouraged from university
teams that include:
 Faculty members whose disciplinary foci are in the
areas of: Human Societies; Language and
Literature; International Relations; Media, Arts &
Cultures; or Freshman Foundations.
 An Instructional Designer
 An International Programs staff member
NEH Institute for Globally Networked Learning
in The Humanities.
Applications available: Dec.1st, 2010.
 Deadline to Apply: April 30th, 2011.
 More Information about the Institute:

 Call for Participation (handout)
 Visit www.suny.edu/global/coil
 Email Jon or Melanie with your specific
questions.
Need a further consultation?
Let us know! We’ll be happy to meet
with you during the conference to
discuss your specific situation.
 Email: [email protected]
or [email protected]

Academic Literature on Globally
Networked Learning Environments

2010 Special Issue on GNLEs in E-Learning and
Digital Media:
http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/content/pdfs/7/issue7_2.asp

Fitzgerald and Lemieux’s 2009 article reflecting on
their course available at:

http://www.eliss.org.uk/CurrentIssueVol23/ViewArticlev2i3/tabid/
286/itemid/117/pubtabid/293/repmodid/411/Default.aspx

Starke-Meyerring and Wilson’s 2008 book
Designing Globally Networked Learning
Environments: Visionary Partnerships,
Policies and Pedagogies

https://www.sensepublishers.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=
21&products_id=596&osCsid=1a7
Thank you and enjoy the
Conference! 
- Jon, Melanie and Tony