This chapter revisits the concept of internationalisation at home in light of the COVID pandemic and also of experiences and ongoing discourses on internationalisation. These include how internationalisation at home relates to diversity, inclusion and decolonisation of curricula. It discusses how the COVID pandemic has led to increased attention to internationalisation at home but also that confusion about terminology and the desire for physical mobility to be available to students may lead us to return to pre-COVID practices, in which internationalisation is mainly understood as mobility for a small minority of students and internationalisation of the home curriculum is a poor second best. A component of this chapter is how Virtual Exchange and Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) have moved into the spotlight during the pandemic but were already in focus areas well before. This will be illustrated by some recent developments in internationalisation at home, mainly from non-Anglophone, European and particularly Dutch perspectives.
In November 2019, scholars and practitioners from ten higher education institutions celebrated the launch of the iKudu project. This project, co-funded by Erasmus [1], focuses on capacity development for curriculum transformation through internationalisation and development of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) virtual exchange. Detailed plans for 2020 were discussed including a series of site visits and face-to-face training. However, the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the plans in ways that could not have been foreseen and new ways of thinking and doing came to the fore. Writing from an insider perspective as project partners, in this paper we draw from appreciative inquiry, using a metaphor of a mosaic as our identity, to first provide the background on the iKudu project before sharing the impact of the pandemic on the project’s adapted approach. We then discuss how alongside the focus of iKudu in the delivery of an internationalised and transformed curriculum using COIL, we have, by our very approach as project partners, adopted the principles of COIL exchange. A positive impact of the pandemic was that COIL offered a consciousness raising activity, which we suggest could be used more broadly in order to help academics think about international research practice partnerships, and, as in our situation, how internationalised and decolonised curriculum practices might be approached. 1. KA2 Erasmus+ Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices (capacity building in the field of Higher Education)
Collaborative learning is not a new teaching and learning approach; it has been around since the 1970s and is an evidence-based practice that has been proven to be effective time after time. Therefore, instead of reinventing the wheel or only relying on best practices or anecdotal evidence of what works and what doesn’t, especially when designing Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) environments, educators might find it useful to make use of existing collaborative learning instructional design elements. These elements have been scientifically proven to be effective and can be applied in both the physical and online international classroom.
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