Internationalization at home: a model of collaboration for international virtual projects

This paper aims to present a model of collaboration for international virtual projects. Due to barriers caused by financial and personal resources that make studies in international locations not always feasible, alternative virtual international experiences emerge as an option of the so-called Internationalization at Home in higher education.This initiative is part of the educational duty to integrate, share and transpose knowledge connecting the classroom to the outside world, as a way to broaden and legitimize discoveries and learning. There are two distinct implementation paths these virtual international experiences can take: one with a project with institutional support and another with the support of an internationalization network, but without institutional guarantees. Our work demonstrates the second pathway through the partnership between the Federal University of Pernambuco (department of English Language and its Literature) and University at Albany ( Communication Department) through the COIL (State University of New York’s Collaborative Online International Learning) Program. After participating in two COIL Professional Development courses, the two instructors designed and agreed to collaborate on an international enrichment project within the disciplines of English Language Teaching Methodology (UFPE) and Speech Composition and Presentation(UA), for a period of 8 weeks in the Fall semester, 2018.
The partnership allowed undergraduate students to interact within an international context to achieve shared project goals of international understanding and communication development. At the same time the project allowed each class to focus on its own learning outcomes as required by their own institution’s requirements. The positive results of the partnership not only affected student understanding and skill building, but the course instructors also benefited by interinstitutional, intercultural work that required learning in this collaboration model.This was achieved through the development of a syllabus partially common to both disciplines, without interfering with the course content and evaluation within both courses, as dictated by each institution. There was also the necessity to manage external factors and constraints such as technology/learning platforms, language and cultural differences, logistics of schedules and meeting times, and integration of the project into institutionally set goals and learning outcomes. Authors such as DeWitt (2002), Byram (2008), Corbett (2010), Knight (2008), Yonkers and Crosley (2014), among others are the basis of our model.