SUNY COIL Conference 2018

Four experienced COIL faculty members invite you to a hands-on workshop for streamlining courses and activities to maximize conversation and collaboration and to minimize frustration for faculty and students.

Ice breaker activities are often highly successful at engaging students and helping them get to know one another. Yet, they don’t require much international collaboration, and are frequently little more than social exchanges. Nevertheless, the beginning week of a COIL project is sometimes the most successful week.

By contrast, group projects can easily become very complex, in an effort to produce results and products. The result is often a “Frankenstein Collaboration,” in which students have done individual work and then sewn the pieces together somewhat haphazardly. Or, it might be a “Steamrolled Collaboration,” appearing to reflect consensus, when in fact it was dictated by one or two heavy-handed students.

Both of these approaches hinder true international conversation, collaboration, and consensus building, since they emphasize product over process. This can lead to frustration, and COIL faculty and students can struggle with assessing what the students learned from the collaboration.

We will invite faculty members to work with a case study--an amalgam of our experiences -- to examine how a philosophy of “less is more” can lead to more effective international collaborations. Rather than focusing on the end product, students and faculty can redirect their efforts and focus instead on the process of international collaboration.

Ultimately, when streamlining COIL modules, weeding out the extras and simplifying assignments can often result in a stronger end product. This workshop will focus on streamlining the design of COIL courses and assignments, in order to maximize student conversation and collaboration and to increase the likelihood of building true consensus.

This workshop will help faculty help students focus on the process of collaboration, instead of finding themselves placing too much emphasis on producing an end product with or without true collaboration.