What do Virtual Exchange Courses Look Like?
Virtual Exchange is a fantastic way to enhance your classroom course with an international, collaborative environment, but what does it look like in practice? On this page, we'll be giving you a general overview for how courses are adapted with the COIL approach and some ways in which faculty change the course's student learning outcomes to suit the multicultural environment.
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If you're pressed for time, here are the key takeaways from this page:
- It most often does not encompass an entire course. Instead, it is generally a 5-10 week module.
- Intercultural dialogue and team-building is an important step for building trust and a collaborative environment.
- Regardless of the activity, much of the intercultural learning process should be student-directed.
- Modules are centered around a collaborative assignment, generally culminating with a deliverable.
Virtual Exchange Structure and Curricular Components
In most cases, the COIL module of a course will not encompass the entire term. For quarter-length courses, the collaborative period for students might only be 5-6 weeks in total, with the most direct collaboration taking 2-3 weeks. Here's an example of how a module might be structured as a part of a quarter-length course.
A COIL module should generally be preceded by some form of expectation setting session. This might happen in the first meeting of the class or even before the class formally begins, but it's important that students have a basic introduction to intercultural communication and collaboration before they start meeting with their international peers. Faculty members aren't expected to be experts in teaching intercultural communication, so Global Engagement can offer support in working through the details with you.
Once the expectations have been set and your students have come to gain a basic awareness of how to work as part of a multicultural team, they should be prepared to start the module. Think of the virtual part of your course as a major collaborative assignment which is preceded by team-building and icebreakers and is followed by reflection and dialogue opportunities. The diagram below illustrates how this can be put into practice over a 6-week period.
It might seem like an excessive addition of content to your course, but remember that you'll be employing synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. The vast majority of the effort will be in setting up the intercultural material. Once it's put together and posted online, the input of time and effort that it will require will not be onerous.
This is just one model, though a common one.
For some information about other models which have been used successfully, watch this video from the Stevens Initiative:
Adding Intercultural Learning to Your Course
Just like any course, a COIL module needs to have solid learning objectives to guide the creation of the material and the instruction.
Think of enhancing your standard course using COIL like adding salt to food. The food doesn't change, but by adding salt (for the purpose of making the food more salty), the food will taste better! But be careful; just as adding salt without knowing what you're doing will result in unpalatable food, forcing a COIL module into a course without understanding the who, what, where, why, when, and how of the addition might result in a course that feels disjointed or scatterbrained.
By thoughtfully applying intercultural orientation and opportunities for dialogue into your course and encouraging it among students outside of class, your students will have a more productive collaboration. There are myriad approaches to facilitating this, but it's a critical part of the broader process.
Watch the video below to learn about one approach to facilitating intercultural dialogue through virtual exchange:
Now that you have a general understanding of Virtual Exchange as an instructional approach, let's explore how UC Santa Cruz is bringing these opportunities to your students through Global Classrooms. Click "Next" to move to the next module.