The Power of Collaboration: COIL

Social Presence (SP) is defined as?how online participants inhabit virtual spaces and indicate their presence in the online environment and their availability and willingness to engage in the communicative exchanges that constitute learning activity in these environments?(Kehrwald, 2008).

Social Presence is not a quality of the technology used, but a quality of the participants involved and depends on the teachers' and learners'- skills with the technology- personal/cultural disposition towards a particular communication that is going on- interpretation of the SP cues projected by others into the online environment.

The pandemic has cemented the idea of the world being more interconnected than ever before, making it imperative that students have the tools and competencies to navigate it successfully.

Imagine the possibility of two institutions coming together,?one with more than 350 academic programs through 13 schools and colleges to nearly 27,000 students. The other?offers 25 programs, including six at the master's level, while its enrollment is approximately 1,000 students representing over 50 nationalities and is also home to about 100 faculty members from 29 countries.

As a part of a plan to expand US-UAE higher education collaboration, Wayne State University (WSU) in Detroit, Michigan, USA, has joined hands with the American University of Ras Al Khaimah (AURAK) in Ras al Khaimah, UAE, on a variety of initiatives, including the subject of this article: COIL

COIL?

COIL stands for Collaborative Online International Learning. WSU and AURAK have partnered with SUNY COIL to offer training and mentorship to faculty participants. Faculty and administrators from both the institution were trained by the SUNY COIL center focusing on helping the students to develop cross-cultural communication skills and a greater appreciation for diverse viewpoints through online team-based project work embedded into their course.

Today workplaces are more diverse than ever, where teams could be scattered across the country or worldwide. Part of this was induced by the pandemic and will continue to be so in the future. The business that once sold products to single demography now sells to a global market. All these factors have converged to make cross-cultural communication a vital part of organizational success.

Our culture influences how we see the world. Various viewpoints and the wide-ranging personal and professional experience of an international team can offer new perspectives that inspire colleagues to visit the workplace—and the world—differently.

Multiple voices, perspectives, and personalities bouncing off one another can give rise to out-of-the-box thinking. By offering a platform for the open exchange of ideas, businesses can reap the biggest benefits of diversity in the workplace.?

We need diversity and inclusion more than ever in our personal and professional lives:?

"Diversity is the range of human differences, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, social class, physical ability or attributes, religious or ethical values system, national origin, and political beliefs.

Inclusion is involvement and empowerment, where the inherent worth and dignity of all people are recognized. An inclusive university promotes and sustains a sense of belonging; it values and practices respect for the talents, beliefs, backgrounds, and ways of living of its members."

BECOMING AN AURAK-WSU GLOBAL FELLOW

Becoming an AURAK-WSU Global Fellow meant we immediately started with a three-week, interactive, asynchronous online workshop requiring 2-4 hours of work per week. We got a chance to think more deeply about different elements of a COIL collaboration and how we will work with your teaching partner from WSU. Topics for this workshop included:

• Online facilitation and collaboration.
• Creating online teams.
• Considering cultural perspectives.
• Partnering for COIL.
• Accessing each institution's support.

I enjoyed the company of partner faculty from WSU, and the breakout room discussions were very exciting. The training was conducted by Hope Windle , Community Development Lead, SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning, The State University of New York.?

She has her team put together a very resourceful Padlet, where everyone interacted, and finally, the workshop ended with:?Finding a partner.

Each faculty created a partner profile and posted it on the padlet, and in the following weeks, we had to find a partner.?

MY PARTNER

Valerie Sweeney Prince

She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in English Language and Literature. Prince has been a fellow at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute, and the Avalon Professor of Humanities at Hampton University. Immediately prior to joining the faculty of Wayne State University as an Associate Professor of African American Studies, Prince served as an Associate Professor of English and Black Studies and as the co-director of Black Studies at Allegheny College.

Valerie Sweeney (Efua) Prince's first monograph, Burnin' Down the House: Home in African American Literature, published by Columbia University Press in 2005, was recognized by Academia as a university press bestseller in April of that year. Her second monograph, Daughter's Exchange, is a hybrid text exploring the African American woman's encounter with the intellectual marketplace.

Prince's work-in-progress includes Missing, the story of three brothers whose mother goes missing. They fear that it's too risky to let anyone know of her disappearance, so they decide to fend for themselves until, they hope, she returns. Missing is a YA illustra-novella, a term coined by author G. P. Taylor for a genre that combines traditional text and art in the sense of both illustrations and graphic novels.

What we are working on will be under wraps as we await confirmation on it. All I can tell you is that I am very excited to see it to its completion. Students of WSU and AURAK will take this partnership to new heights with COIL.

Let's redefine TEAMWORK with expanded cultural knowledge and improved intercultural competency.