SUNY COIL CENTER

HISTORY

Its goals are as follows:

To extend the enriching benefits of international education to a broader spectrum of SUNY students, faculty and staff than presently are able to study abroad.
To encourage and support the development of courses incorporating international collaborations which have a significant online component.
To develop a network of faculty, administrators, staff and students from SUNY and campuses abroad who are committed to online international education and to provide venues, including an annual conference, where their ideas and experiences can be shared.
To meet the international market demand for educational opportunities at SUNY by locating, contacting and developing foreign partners who are interested in collaborating on online international projects.
To educate ourselves and our colleagues about practices and technologies that can enhance our ability to create inspiring cross-national courses and to create a repository of online resources to facilitate this work.
To enhance the development of hybrid teaching models by sharing faculty between SUNY campuses - both virtually and in the classroom.
To demonstrate and promote model online international courses through online meeting spaces, dedicated web pages and in-person presentations throughout the SUNY system.
To develop funding sources that can support the incubation and development of innovative international online course work, degree programs, training and professional development, and life-long learning.
To foster the sustainability of online international scholarship, by promoting the "bottom-up" culture of individuality, entrepreneurship and creativity inherent in the academic community.

Partnerships

The COIL Center's primary focus is on the creation of collaborative, international learning courses and particularly those of a hybrid and innovative nature. These are often courses where two or more classes meet separately and regularly in different countries, but where all the participating students and faculty also meet online. Here they can share ideas, collaboratively produce work that is relevant to their course of study and reflect upon their own and their partners' cultural points of view. The development and implementation of such courses takes some time, as the cross-cultural dynamics of planning can be fairly complex, but there is a typical pattern to this process that can be summarized here.