“Our students are worth acquiring knowledge and skills at a high level of global standards. We should now build educational content with them, not just for them, as it used to be, and utilize digital tools,” – Lyudmyla Smolska, Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of the Institute of Economics and Management, National University of Water and Environmental Engineering.
The five-day school for instructors from the Alliance of Ukrainian Universities (AUU) Global Synergy dedicated to COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) has concluded. Thirty-four participants from 6 Alliance universities took part in the professional development program on the internationalization of higher education. They learned from 11 COIL practitioner trainers based all around the world. These experts and innovators in international online learning, shared their experience in launching and managing COIL projects.
“COIL is an immensely valuable opportunity to step out of our bubble and learn about teaching approaches in other countries, for students to gain experience in international collaboration during their studies, not only when they already have clients or partners, to showcase our culture to the world and share what’s happening in our country today, to provide international collaboration experience to those who currently cannot travel abroad, and to establish potentially beneficial international connections,” says Tetiana Zakharchenko, Head of the Bachelor’s Program in Computer Science at the Ukrainian Catholic University.
A significant portion of the activities within the training included a practical component, allowing participants to immediately apply the acquired knowledge and skills. Sessions with practitioner trainers covered various topics, from managing COIL projects and intercultural understanding to a wide range of electronic tools for online teaching and learning. This offline event provided an opportunity to achieve incredible results not only in COIL implementation but also in expanding connections between universities, both in Ukraine and abroad.
