This Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project involved students from Coventry University participating in a Q&A session with the executive director of revenue generation at NBC Sport, the US broadcaster. After the Q&A session students were tasked with pitching a case for NBC to buy the rights to broadcast the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. This was presented to Alex Khilnani from NBC, who provided their feedback to the class for a follow up discussion.
This virtual exchange allowed students to consider the opportunities and obstacles of presenting broadcasted sporting events in different countries, in particular an event in which the broadcasting country would not be competing in. In addition to this, students gained an insight about how NBC Sport works with existing global sports events such as the Olympic Games, especially surrounding issues such as time zones, new media, and the ability to shift between cultural environments.
Partner University(s)/Organisation(s): Jose Maria de Fonseca Wineries (Portugal)
ProjectOverview:
At PG Marketing Course Direction, we were lucky to establish an excellent collaboration with a Portuguese winery, Jose Maria da Fonseca, based at Azeitão, a few miles south of Lisbon. The JMF Marketing Manager, Denise Madeira, presented us with full background information regarding three of their unique brands.
Because of the possibility of working with this fine international winery, PG Marketing Course Direction decided to explore avenues that could truly enthuse students with authentic marketing problems to be resolved. The Assessment Brief for Marketing Communications called for students to provide a situation analysis regarding the launch of one of the above brands into a country of choice. The teams had to make an advertising pitch of their ideas to the module leader. Finally, pitches were made to JMF Marketing.
During this process the Marketing Manager of JMF made a Conference Call on MS Teams to explain current strategy and to answer questions and was available for meetings with teaching staff.
The resulting work, a 1600-word individual report, constituted 100% of the student grade on that module. JMF Marketing and Direction considered the best pitches and chose one for the very successful CUMMAS Awards, held at the end of March 2021.
Online Tools Used: Email, YouTube, Microsoft Teams
Things to remember:
A COIL project can run on mandatory basis and be linked to assessment.
Image: 1st Prize. Poster: Overload. Student: Jeongmin Lee, BA Advertising and Marketing
Academic Year: 2020-21
Project Leaders: Anvita Kumar, Jayne Pyatt
Partner University(s)/Organisation(s): Bangkok University International (Thailand)
ProjectOverview:
Following the success of a multi-faceted partnership with Bangkok University funded by British Council Higher Education Partnership Programme in 2018, a COIL project with 3 elements has been launched in Semester 2 20-21 for Year 2 BA Advertising and Marketing and BA Digital Marketing students (Element 1) and PG Marketing students (Element 3) at Coventry University and undergraduate Marketing students from Bangkok University, in which they explored the impact of cross-cultural factors in consumer behaviour.
This COIL project had received the recent recognition from British Council Thailand as Success Story against some high profiled partnerships to recognise our proactive and innovative response to the global pandemic by using the digital platform to enhance students’ inter-cultural competence development through the global virtual team. A poster competition (Element 2), based on one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (number 12: “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”), was launched and a prize giving ceremony was arranged in March 2021 to celebrate the success of students and the partnership. Further plans are under discussion to enhance the in-depth multi-facet partnership on a long term base.
Online Tools Used: Open Moodle, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp
For the first time this year, we built an international experience in to the ‘Enterprise and Entrepreneurship’ module for third year Marketing students. Although travel has been so badly constrained by the global pandemic, this has also created new opportunities for online interactions. We took advantage of this and ran live Q+A sessions for students with a very engaging international entrepreneur. It should never be under-estimated how much benefit the students gain from exchanges with industry practitioners, and this was echoed in the comments made by our students following the live sessions.
The practicalities of what we did included the following: – setting the students up to do some reading about our international entrepreneur (based in the Netherlands), Jamie Nascimento, and his string of successful business ventures – running a seminar class exercise in which students used their ‘homework’ to discuss, in online break-out groups, Jamie’s background and businesses and to craft specific questions for Jamie – collating the student questions – running 30 min Q+A sessions with Jamie Nascimento in each of the three online seminars that were held in that particular teaching week. Students asked their own questions and had the chance to also cover any follow up questions in those sessions – a final exercise in which we connected personal experiences from the Q+A session (and from the previous week’s prep. session) with a learning reflection exercise that was part of the module coursework.
Feedback from both Jamie and from students (many of whom have LinkedIn with Jamie since to follow his new company’s progress) was extremely positive, and we will continue to build this experience in to the module teaching plan for future years.
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:
A COIL project can run outside a module.
A COIL project can run with students from different modules and courses.
This website was created using Coventry.Domains, a service of the Coventry University Group. The information, views, opinions and discussion contained on this website are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Coventry University Group. For more information on privacy, cookies, takedown requests and more, visit our policies page.
