Memberships and cooperations
SUNY COIL Global Network
The SUNY COIL Center has worked for more than 15 years to promote and professionalise the practice of collaborative international online learning and virtual exchange. It serves the institutions of the State University of New York and also provides services to higher education institutions around the world.
The SUNY COIL Global Network is a global community of practice and serves as a hub for the exchange of information and ideas in the field of Collaborative Online International Learning. It provides professional support, including partner referrals.
Membership is open to all accredited higher education institutions around the world. In the meantime, more than 100 higher education institutions worldwide have joined. Heilbronn University has been a member of the SUNY COIL Global Network since April 2021, giving the university access to members-only resources, meetings, workshops, online discussions and COIL partner exchanges.
Source and further info: https://coil.suny.edu/
COIL Connect
COIL Connect is an initiative of the COIL Virtual Exchange Foundation, Inc. a non-profit corporation incorporated in the State of New York. Its mission is to support the international growth of COIL Virtual Exchange at the institutional level. COIL Connect was founded by Jon Rubin in 2020 to help universities and colleges develop, integrate and institutionalise COIL initiatives.
Membership of COIL Connect is free and open to all. However, higher education institutions should be able to appoint a COIL coordinator.
The COIL Connect for Virtual Exchange website includes, among other things, an open, public directory of higher education institutions worldwide that practice COIL VE. The information published here is entirely produced by member institutions providing data about their programmes.
Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences has been a member of COIL Connect since July 2021.
Source and further info: https://coilconnect.org
Sharing Perspectives
The Sharing Perspectives Foundation is a non-profit organisation that has engaged around 10,000 young people in Virtual Exchange courses and collaborated with over 80 higher education institutions in the last three years alone.
Sharing Perspective offers contemporary online learning experiences that enable people to interact constructively across differences and boundaries.
Students from Heilbronn University participated in a so-called Ready-Made course by Sharing Perspectives during the winter term 21/22 across all faculties. This was a 9-week VE flagship course on the topic of "Climate Movements".
Participants from diverse backgrounds came together weekly to discuss the course topics under the guidance of experienced dialogue facilitators. In addition, experts, academics and practitioners provided insights through audio-visual lecture series. Students also had the opportunity to engage in interactive assignments that merged their online experience with their offline reality.
Source and more info: https://sharingperspectivesfoundation.com/
UNICollaboration
UNICollaboration is a cross-disciplinary professional organisation for telecollaboration and virtual exchange in higher education. The organisation was founded at the second conference on telecollaboration in higher education at Trinity College, Dublin in April 2016.
UNICollaboration acts as a partner of the European Commission, which promotes the Virtual Exchange methodology under the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange Initiative.
The organisation has two main objectives:
1. to promote the development and integration of research and practice in the field of telecollaboration and virtual exchange in all disciplines and subject areas of higher education.
2. to participate in raising awareness of telecollaboration and virtual exchange at institutional and policy levels.
Heilbronn University has been a member of UNICollaboration since April 2021 and thus receives, among other things, support in finding partners for virtual exchange projects as well as 1:1 support for teachers in the implementation of their VE projects.
Source and further information: https://www.unicollaboration.org/
Soliya
Soliya is a New York City-based non-profit organisation founded in July 2002 by Lucas Welch and Liza Chambers, among others. It uses virtual exchange to engage young adults in constructive dialogue, working towards a more connected and understanding global society.
The organisation itself uses a video conferencing platform called Exchange Portal to run so-called Connect programmes, where young adults in post-secondary and vocational institutions can engage in facilitated synchronous discussions about current events. The focus here is on collaborative dialogue between young adults from Western and Muslim communities. These programmes can be integrated into existing higher education curricula.
Soliya also offers synchronous and asynchronous training in Virtual Exchange. In this context, Heilbronn University had organised a training on Soliya for its faculty on Constructive Online Engagement in November 2021.
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