SEED projects 2019 – A new Canvas for teaching and learning

COIL: Collaborative Online International Learning

Assoc Prof Marek Tesar

Assoc Prof Marek Tesar (Faculty of Education and Social Work)

The COIL approach was developed by the Office of International Programs at the State University of New York. In a pilot project in 2018, the students engaged in online collaborative tasks with their peers in other universities, contexts and continents. The SEED grant enabled us to carry out a more robust project in 2019.

Enhancing intercultural understandings locally and globally may never have been more important than now. Responding to contemporary calls for educational change, this project fosters cross-cultural international collaborations and understandings between early childhood student teachers and teacher educators from four universities in the USA and New Zealand. The initial analysis has explicated the university students and our own (teacher educators) learning about cultural implications on orientations and pedagogies, to inform the ongoing shaping of cross-cultural initial teacher education using this new teaching approach, Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). The project has also explored the potential of Canvas as a local and global learning space which connects students and teachers.