Virtual Internationalization: What and Why

In the coming academic year, Jissen Women’s University will partner with the American Women’s College at Bay Path University in the United States to provide a shared course focused on women’s leadership. While this partnership entails students’ visiting each other’s country and campus, the collaborative component, a project for which students explore the topic of women’s leadership from their different cultural perspectives, will take place virtually. To accomplish this, the course design will adhere to the guidelines of COIL, Collaborative Online International Learning, an educational paradigm put forth by the State University of New York (SUNY). The purposes of this paper are to provide a brief description of COIL and to place it in the context of the larger movement of virtual internationalization in education.departmental bulletin pape