USE FOUNDATIONS
by Michel Hermans
About the COIL project
This year’s COIL project was with a contact at the Fachhochschule in Vienna. They’ve been a contact of ours for several years now, and we’ve done this project together several times, though in previous years the students would meet in person. This year, we had to turn it into a COIL project, but we tried to keep the content of the programme the same and only change what needed to be adapted to COIL.
For this project, students look at cases of mergers between organisations, and the situations that arise because of intercultural differences. I noticed that the students this year actually worked very fast and efficiently; they finished the project a little earlier than I expected, and their final presentations were of high quality. I think that is because in other years, when students could work together in person, they would easily get carried away and chat with each other about things not related to the project. They’d have a lot of fun, but would work more slowly.
The students this year had to hold all their meetings online, and I think that created more focus, both because they schedule that meeting for a specific purpose, and because online meetings are more tiring, so they don’t want them to drag out. We found this out too, when we initially started this COIL version of the project with 6-hour days: that was far too much for one day, so we later changed it to a maximum of 4 hours a day.
Struggles & successes
The biggest challenge was changing an existing project to a fully online COIL project. Previously it included a week-long study visit, where students could check out the other university, meet the students in person, and often had a fun evening programme. There was personal contact between the students, and they could chat about their experiences as students in a very informal way.
We were worried that doing the entire project online would make it boring. Thankfully, it was not boring at all! We had a few meetings with our contact in Vienna before the project started, to discuss how we could make it interactive, and it all worked out fine. Instead of students getting to know each other in person, we used online icebreaker games in small groups. We also found that it was very important to have a chat function, to facilitate informal contact between the students.
The main criticism we received from students – which can also be a tip for other lecturers – was to use different icebreaker games. We rotated the students, so they could get to know everyone in small groups, which meant they had to do the same icebreaker game over and over; next time we’ll come up with several different games instead.
All in all, doing this project online this year, as a COIL, went very well – the fact that we already had a solid foundation with our partner, who is a long-term contact, really helped to make it a success.
Michel Hermans has been a lecturer at HRM since 2000. His primary focus is on Vitality and Sustainable Employability. He has worked to expand the internationalisation of the HRM programme since the start.
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Michel Hermans has been a lecturer at HRM since 2000. His primary focus is on Vitality and Sustainable Employability. He has worked to expand the internationalisation of the HRM programme since the start.
