Reflections of an Early Career Academic on their Experience of Running a COIL Project

Abstract

This paper draws on Rolfe, Freshwater and Jasper’s (2001) framework of reflective writing, to reflect on an early career academic’s experience of embedding a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project in a General Education module at a University of Technology (UoT). COIL is a pedagogical tool that seeks to deepen students’ global engagement, while promoting intercultural competence. Cornerstone 101 (CSTN101) is one of 44 General Education modules offered at this UOT. It is a compulsory module for all first-year students. Whereas there are various COIL projects that are run at this UoT, this was the first time a project of this nature ran in the Centre that services the CSTN101 module. 89 CSTN101 students that form the part-time class participated in this project. The 7-week long COIL project titled “Literature for Change: Envisioning Sustainable Futures” was a collaboration between three modules in two universities – a university in the United States of America, New York and the University of Technology in South Africa. In this international virtual exchange project, students worked together to imagine change by analysing a work of literature that proposes a present or future society of collective human thriving. Using interpretivist phenomenological analysis and drawing on critical reflection as a methodology, I employ Rolfe et al. (2001) as a framework I reflect on my experiences of having run a COIL project as an early career academic for the first time. I explore what my key learnings were, and how this learning will be implemented in future COIL projects.