The COIL objectives:

• Clearly show the purpose of collaboration: students’ collaboration in COIL needs to be purposeful: students must know why they need one another to accomplish common goals and why they may be more successful in attaining the goals together rather than independently. The sense and purpose of collaboration is crucial when defining the COIL objectives.
• Involve intercultural learning: one of the main attributes of COIL should be to develop students’ intercultural and/or global competences.
• Draw on the partners’ discipline and interdisciplinary perspectives: instructors from both partnered institutions build the objectives around their disciplines. Ideally, instructors take an interdisciplinary perspective: they share and compare their perspectives on knowledge and paradigms associated with the discipline in their locality/culture and are open to be inspired by and incorporate other disciplines’ approaches and findings.
• Draw on and internationalize the existing objectives of your course: setting the COIL objectives does not mean completely re-writing the objectives and learning outcomes of your course/module, rather it involves integrating intercultural learning and internationalized learning outcomes [see below] into your existing course/module. Courses in both partnered institutions should arrive at similar or shared learning outcomes built around the shared discipline [see below].

General objectives and learning outcomes:

The general objectives set what kind of competences should all students develop in COIL.

21st Century skills

• IC – intercultural competence (i.e. a better understanding of yourself and where you come from, greater awareness of the other, empathy, openness to diversity, etc.)
• ICC – intercultural communicative competence (i.e. the ability to communicate effectively with people from cultures different from your own)
• DIG LIT – digital literacy skills (e.g. how to communicate effectively online, how to use certain tools for certain types of communication, where to look for information, etc.)
• TEAMS – the ability to work in teams (in class and/or online)
• LANG – language skills (e.g. how to communicate in a foreign language such as English with non-native speakers or with native speakers)

(Guth and Helm, 2017, pp. 39-40)

How to define students’ learning outcomes in the COIL

First, ask yourself what students will know and be able to do as a result of their participation in the COIL.

Students’ learning outcomes (SLOs) should:

• aim at knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students can use in their lives and work and that has enduring meaning
• align with the learning activities and assignments [see below]
• be measurable directly through a work product or performance or indirectly through a reflection or survey [see below]
• be internationalized learning outcomes

Examples of students’ internationalized learning outcomes (ILOs) (Leask, 2015):

• ability to connect the local with the global: awareness of interdependence of local and global issues
• ability to communicate, negotiate and solve problems effectively in a range of intercultural situations relevant to the discipline
• ability to work effectively with members from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds
• ability to evaluate, interpret, and compare situations/contexts of an issue in two culturally/linguistically different environments (Leask, 2015).

SLOs additionally should:

• generate students’ curiosity and stimulates reflective conversation
• invite creativity and new possibilities
• generate students’ initiative and action
• stay with students and evoke more questions

(Doscher, 2023a, pp. 253-255)

How to make SLOs demonstrable, measurable, realistic and achievable (examples):

Through task-related activities:

• assign students to groups of four and ask them to gather three different perspectives on a global issue; students gain the perspectives through: 1) sharing personal stories (in discussion, for example in break out rooms [see Zoom tutorial in ch 7], 2) collecting evidence from three different sources (e.g., analyzing articles on the same topic/issue in newspapers published in three different localities, interviewing people of different cultural backgrounds, etc.; this is a project-based activity/assignment complementing the online collaboration)
• students work in groups (break out rooms in Zoom) based on their culture or location and critically reflect on cultural rules and biases in self and own cultural group on issues related to the discipline or topic (for example, sustainable development); a (self-)designated member of the group writes the group’s main findings in Padlet [see ch 7] where students from all groups can see and compare cultural biases and rules across the groups.

More on designing tasks

Through assessment:

• students use self-assessment tools to monitor their intercultural growth during the COIL.
• students self-assess their intercultural experience prior the COIL and their expectations from COIL and after the COIL self-assess and reflect on their intercultural growth and experience with engaging in COIL activities (the pre-COIL and post-COIL survey).

More tips on assessment:

Assessment criteria should be clear, fair, and transparent.

Let students know which assignments will be graded for completion, such as icebreakers, self-assessment, and surveys, and which will be graded based on quality criteria, such as the final work product (group presentation) (Doscher, 2023a, p. 265)

Note on grading:

Instructors from partner institutions are encouraged to discuss the work of all students and how they will grade students, but they assign grades only to their own students.

Local instructors remain responsible for their own students’ completion of work (Rubin, 2023c, p. 74).

Balanced and fair students’ participation need to be secured:

• If the students on one side of the collaboration receive less academic credit for COIL work than the students on the other side, it is unlikely that the student groups will be equally committed to work (ibid, p. 75).

More TIPS on defining the learning outcomes in collaboration with partners:

Take time to think about the learning outcomes of your existing course/module and how they can be utilized or transformed for the purpose of COIL and its general objectives.

Ask the following questions:

• What kind of competences and skills does my course/module expect students to develop?
• How might COIL enhance those competences?

Discuss the objectives with the partners. Try to understand how the objectives relate to each partners’ educational contexts and curricula and how they can be applied in the shaping of common goals for COIL.  Make sure all participants have a say.

Do not impose your ideas of objectives and goals on the partner.

Brainstorm with the partners possible COIL topics related to the discipline and with potential local and global societal and/or environmental impact (for more see Corbett et al, 2024, pp. 28-35).