Category: Humanities

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

School of Humanities

Academic Year: 2021-22

Project Leaders: Marina Orsini- Jones, Jenny Wells

Partner University(s)/Organisation(s): Hanoi University of Science and Technology (Vietnam)

Project Overview:

This Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project ran a virtual exchange with English language teachers and educators from various areas of Vietnam alongside current English language teaching masters’ students at Coventry University. With the help of ViVEXELT; an action research project funded by the British Council Vietnam Digital Learning Innovation Fund and supported by the National Foreign Language Project in Vietnam; participants aimed to encourage partnerships between the UK and Vietnam to generate new research, insight and/or innovations to improve the teaching and learning of English.

Students from both institutions engaged in a virtual exchange course consisting of both asynchronous and synchronous activities such as live discussions and workshops on Zoom.

This COIL project aimed to foster the development of its participants’ English language teaching skills (ELT) and support the development of the speaking and interactional online skills of English language teachers and students in teacher education in Vietnam and the UK.

Online Tools Used: Email, Google Docs, Open Moodle, YouTube and Zoom

Supporting URL:

https://vivexelt.com

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

School of Humanities

Academic Year: 2020-21

Project Leader: James Henry, Adah Onjewu

Partner University(s)/Organisation(s): Laurea University of Applied Sciences (Finland), University of Paris-Saclay (France), UIC Barcelona International University of Catalonia (Spain)

Project Overview:

In the Spring semester of 2021 I set up and delivered a COIL project in collaboration with Laurea University in Helsinki, Saclay University in Paris and the International University of Catalunya in Barcelona.

In this project Business and Education students from the four different universities worked together in small groups to discuss international and cross-cultural business issues.   They collaborated with each other to solve business problems and to study examples of business writing.

The students worked together very well in their discussion groups and I really enjoyed the collaboration with academic colleagues in different countries.   The CU COIL team were also very helpful and supportive throughout the planning and the delivery of the project.

We are looking forward to running this project again in the spring of 2022!

Online Tools Used: Open Moodle, Zoom

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

School of Humanities

Academic Year: 2020-21

Project Leader: Felix Roesch

Partner University(s)/Organisation(s): Hosei University (Japan)

Project Overview:

Since the end of 2019, the world as we know it came to a halt. Many things that we took for granted like travelling or simply going to classes were no longer possible or at least entailed significant health risks. This is supposed to be the new normal, but the world will eventually come back to the old normal and hopefully will have taken the right clues on how to minimize the risks of such pandemics to happen again.

To understand what was happening around us and to learn how countries responded to Covid-19 and developed strategies to deal with it, students from Coventry and Tokyo virtually joined forces.

The aim of this project was to gain a comprehensive overview of political responses to the Covid-19 pandemic around the globe. To do so we investigated the following:

• What strategies are pursued and how affective are they?
• Who are the key actors in producing responses?
• Which ethical positions are taken by political decision-makers in producing responses to the pandemic?
• Which people are affected by the pandemic most and what does this tell us about political systems and cultures?
• What could political communities around the world do better to improve the situation?

Students participating in our project were asked to form groups to investigate responses to Covid-19 in a country of their choice with the aim to produce an online presentation. These presentations served as the basis for discussions during our weekly joint live sessions. Each group consisted of students from both universities and presentations were delivered as power-point presentations via Zoom.

Online Tools Used: Email, Open Moodle, Zoom

In addition to the presentations, the project leads wrote with several students a paper about the use of COIL projects for studying International Relations. This paper has been published as “Un(COIL)ing the Pandemic: Active and Affective Learning in Times of Covid-19” in PS: Political Science & Politics, an official journal of the American Political Science Association.

Un(COIL)ing the Pandemic: Active and Affective Learning in Times of COVID-19 | PS: Political Science & Politics | Cambridge Core