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“I think COIL experiences allow our students to interact with different cultures, different points of view, and different work conditions and logistics. I was born in El Salvador, and I know how things, particularly in engineering education, are different. However, most of my students haven't had that exposure… so allowing them to work with people from another part of the world is really motivating to me. These COIL experiences are personally motivating as an Engineering Educator.” -Dr. Erick Vasquez, Associate Professor, Chemical and Materials Engineering Department.

From developing a new design for a viscometer to determining how long it takes a chicken patty to cook in an air fryer, the assignments in Dr. Erick Vasquez’s chemical engineering courses go beyond what you might expect from everyday homework assignments. In a recent CME 325: Transport Phenomena II course, students had a chance to see what international collaboration in chemical engineering might look like, in a project that introduced them to working with peers in El Salvador. 

Vasquez was a member of the 2019-2020 School of Engineering Cohort of the UD COIL Fellows Program, in which faculty are educated on how to “COIL” a project in a course they teach. Collaborative Online International Learning, otherwise known as COIL, has gained attention during the past several years.  It is an emerging teaching and learning model that promotes intercultural competence through an online environment.  COIL is embedded within courses, and typically spans a timeframe of 2-8 weeks.  Students have the opportunity to work on a collaborative project with students from a course in another country, and receive the benefit of being instructed by two faculty members that co-design and co-teach the COIL experience. 

During his COIL Fellows program, which was cut off suddenly when the pandemic hit, Vasquez planned on collaborating with a colleague in Turkey, and completed the Fellows program with that plan in mind. However, when the time came to implement his project, the colleague was no longer able to collaborate, busy managing the transition higher ed made to online environments necessitated by the pandemic. Vasquez turned to his alma mater in El Salvador, the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas. Though the professors he had worked with as an undergraduate student had retired or moved on to other opportunities, a new faculty member in Vasquez’s field of fluid dynamics was eager to collaborate. Professor Erick Ramos agreed to collaborate through his Operaciones de Flujo de Fluidos (Fluid Flow Operations) course, though he hadn’t ever been trained in COIL or implemented a COIL project. Vasquez says his COIL Fellows training came in handy here, as he shared resources and best practices that he had learned in his workshops at UD. 

Vasquez and Ramos introduced their respective courses to the COIL Project, which they described as a short term learning experience focusing on either momentum transport or fluid flow. “We know that many challenges will arise, ranging from language aspects and time differences, but it’s part of being connected with professionals and students worldwide,” Vasquez said in an introduction to his students. However, this is part of working in an international environment, he said, and students taking full advantage of the COIL opportunity can “grow their professional network and their careers as well.” 

The students were able to join a group from the collaborating university and work together to create a technical memo on non-Newtonian fluids, sharing their knowledge and perspectives in a collaborative project culminating in a Japanese-style PechaKucha presentation. Students worked together for three weeks, and, in a follow-up survey on the experience, reflected on the opportunities they were given: “It was really interesting meeting [the students from El Salvador]” one UD student said, “no one in our group slacked off and everyone communicated extremely well. No one was afraid to shut down or approve an idea. For being in different countries we worked very efficiently.” A student in El Salvador noted that he learned to “accept the ideas of others and allow them to instruct me or help me in things that I did not handle very well, [and] in terms of technical knowledge, I based my brainstorming on concepts learned in class about viscosity and concepts related to forces learned in Physics 1, in addition to scientific research as we progressed in the project.”

Vasquez and Ramos’ work didn’t go unnoticed. After submitting a research review on the project to the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) annual conference and exposition in 2022, their project “Can the COVID-19 pandemic boost collaborative online international learning (COIL) in engineering education? – A review for potential implementations” was selected as best poster for the Chemical Engineering division. Vasquez is a co-PI of an ongoing project that received a grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate how global engagement interventions (such as COIL) can lead to increased global competency in engineering students, led by principal investigator Scott Schneider, and co-PIs Eric Janz, and Corinne Mowrey, all from UD’s School of Engineering. Vasquez looks forward to implementing COIL as part of this grant in spring of 2024, as he will be on sabbatical this coming spring. For that project, he’ll be collaborating with a professor from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, who came across his paper and is interested in exploring COIL in his own engineering classroom. 

Vasquez is planning to require COIL participation in the project with the Colombian university. As an engineering educator, he firmly believes it important to cultivate these global connections through this kind of collaborative work. “I emphasize collaborative learning when introducing a project to students in my classes. For COIL, I ask them: Do you want to meet somebody from another country and communicate with them? Learn about their culture, learn about their campus…Getting into an unknown situation can lead to questions such as: are you willing to fail, right? In particular, time zone differences, language, and multiple class schedules play a significant role when working in groups. Some of them don't like that idea. They want to work with their colleagues here. They didn't want to take the risk.” All evidence would suggest that the risk was worth it, says Vasquez: “That's part of the skillset we're trying to develop: Are our students effective at working and managing uncomfortable situations? For example, being unable to communicate fully with someone in another language. How do they handle this type of situation? It’s part of the skillset we want our students to build.”COIL is allowing students to engage in global learning experiences that stretch them and develop their understanding of the world without the investment of traveling to another country, giving them opportunities to grow as professionals and as people. For more information on COIL for faculty, contact gia@udayton.edu.