Abstract:

Since 2021, the authors have developed a Virtual Exchange between a Brazilian Community College and a Portuguese University – both are public Higher Education Institutions. The COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) aims to analyze how organizations with presence in both Brazil and Portugal communicate their social responsibility and sustainability practices to stakeholders. Each COIL team has students from the Brazilian and the Portuguese institutions. Students are invited to reflect if there is coherence between what organizations advertise and what they effectively do in terms of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) practices. This COIL approaches an integrative vision of the 2030 Agenda for SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). Having students work on “tasks which focus on global themes and issues and which requires students to work together to solve a problem or complete a task together” is what O´Dowd (2021, p.3) call a transnational model of Virtual Exchange. COIL teams elaborate case studies, summarize them in videos, posters and Power Point presentations that are posted on a Padlet platform. These “deliverables” serve as a basis for a general debate carried out synchronously at the end of each COIL projects. From the first edition, in November 2021, the authors engaged in several projects allowing students and professors to achieve more enduring experience with Internationalization at Home projects. COIL entails several challenges to students to tackle: to develop intercultural, linguistic, digital and interpersonal skills among group participants. Therefore, communication, as a process of mediation in the construction of identities and cultures, is essential for the success of collaborative activities between HEIs (Higher Education Institutions). Professors communicated with their students, both face-to-face in the classroom and through local learning management systems (Teams and Moodle). Students communicated also via WhatsApp, shared documents in Google Drive and posted their project deliverables on Padlet. The COIL project evaluation process considered the following assessment tools: case study presentation, via Zoom sessions where students jointly debated and discussed the results of their projects, students reciprocal evaluations; faculty evaluation of teams and individual students; and a survey application to collect students experience feedback through a structured questionnaire prepared by the COIL team. These COIL experiences demonstrate the importance of democratic decision-making among peers, developing negotiation and leadership skills, expectancy management, the awareness of intercultural learning competence, communication, team working, time management, conflict management, autonomy, problem solving, self-and-peer assessment and the development of socioemotional competences. At last, the authors stress some advantages and challenges of COIL projects for professors’ personal, professional and academic development.

Keywords:

Virtual Exchange, COIL, Organizational Communication, Sustainable Development Goals, Internationalization at Home.