COIL overview
In 2020 and 2021, the Office of the Provost launched efforts to expand Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) at Montclair State University. This innovative, online, globalized pedagogy was promoted to benefit students during the pandemic. In cooperation with the Office of Faculty Excellence, the Provost’s Office offered professional development opportunities for both tenured and tenure-track faculty to develop COIL courses. Details about the COIL pedagogy and its benefits are detailed here by the State University of New York, a pioneer in this area.
COIL initiatives continue at Montclair State University in the present through partnerships between the Office of International Academic Initiatives, the Office of Faculty Excellence, and Instructional Technology and Design Services. These initiatives are particularly timely because of the Task Force on Montclair State’s Global Reach, which has been busy in 2022 and 2023 compiling information about COIL projects and other internationalization initiatives which are already up and running. See below some details about recent courses taught using COIL pedagogy.
Student-Led International Collective Exhibition
In Spring 2023, Professor Christopher Kaczmarek of Art & Design brought a fascinating course to life in partnership with a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland. The course was a student-led creative and collaborative challenge designed to give students the opportunity to build transferable creative skills, and to give them an international exhibition credit on their resumes. Students envisioned and orchestrated a collective trans-Atlantic exhibition with a peer group from the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee, Scotland. Faculty from both universities guided the class with imagining the cloud of potential possibilities, working through a process to narrow the possibilities down into a plan, and then finding a way to make it happen. Part of the challenge was how to do a cohesive collective exhibition, not just an exhibition exchange. The students worked together to have works of art exist in two places at once, and were mindful of how the transport/translation of the work would impact its reception. As a culmination of these trans-Atlantic efforts, the collaborative work completed by both groups of students was shown simultaneously at exhibitions in Dundee, Scotland and Montclair, NJ.
