Please note: This project description sets a very useful example for new COIL leaders

Faculty of Business and Law

School of Marketing and Management

Image: First page of the presentation from one of the winning groups

Academic Year: 2020-21

Project Leader: Barry Emery

Partner University(s)/Organisation(s): Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands)

Project Overview:

The project formed a part of the larger Cross Border Project run by Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS). Students of AUAS (150) were divided into six groups and then paired with a similar number of students from the following Business Schools – Hanover, Munich, Dortmund, Paris and Coventry (SMM UG Marketing). Each of the six groups were assigned a real, live client project. Each client project was based on an export context and should include a relevant aspect of sustainability but each had their own sector focus.

As the project ran outside the academic year and was not attached to a specific marketing module I recruited marketing students via one-to-one interview on MS Teams from across all three years of the programmes of the marketing portfolio (BA Marketing, BA Advertising and Marketing, BA Business and Marketing and BA Digital Marketing).

We formed 9 AUAS-Coventry groups to investigate the Purity brief and I ran timetabled combined support sessions with my AUAS equivalent, as well as combined support sessions with the Marketing Executive and the Head of Marketing of Purity. Both my AUAS colleague and I also offered drop-in sessions as further support to the project. One progress session was run live from an AUAS classroom with the AUAS students in the classroom with their tutor and the Coventry students and myself attending online, on screen, in the AUAS classroom at the same time.

Purity recognised the quality of the research reports, confirmed they would take some suggestions forward into their international marketing strategy and awarded prizes to 3 teams in recognition of the quality of their work. AUAS also ran a social media competition on the theme of cross-cultural communication across all six client groups – this was won by a BA Advertising and Marketing student from year 2 by popular vote from all the students taking part.

Online Tools Used: Email, Microsoft Teams, Miro, Zoom

Statement from a final year BA Business and Marketing student who took part:

The AUAS project has been a fantastic opportunity to develop my cross-cultural communication and online collaboration skills as well as gain real life business consulting experience. As the world moves into new ways of working, this project has allowed me to learn and use new collaborative software’s such as MIRO, Microsoft Teams and Google Docs. Working in an international team has also allowed me to develop my intercultural awareness and has allowed me to understand how different cultures work on projects and as a team. The knowledge and skills I have developed throughout this project are all relevant to the real word and can be taken with me into my graduate career.

Things to remember:

  1. A COIL project can run outside a module.
  2. A COIL project can run with students from different modules and courses.