COIL prepares students for global challenges

Collaborative Online International Learning courses have grown steadily at UNC-Chapel Hill since COIL was introduced in 2020. With more than 40 courses offered each year, Carolina’s program is one of the largest in the world. More than 81 Carolina faculty have partnered with instructors in different countries, connecting students to tackle global issues and solve problems.

Two faculty members — Yuki Aratake and Dr. Marie Lina Excellent — have used COIL courses to make global education available to more than 1,000 students each year. Aratake is a teaching professor in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ Asian and Middle Eastern studies department, and Excellent is an assistant professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health’s public health leadership and practice department.

Forming global connections

For her Gateway to Mastering Japanese course, Aratake worked with Hatsuko Itaya at Hokkaido Musashi Women’s College in Sapporo, Japan. She has taught the course three times.

“Early sessions are about getting to know each other,” Aratake said. “Later, students dive into deeper topics, like women’s status in Japan and the U.S. Having peers the same age really motivates them to speak.”

Japanese language student Nathan Hicks ’26 enjoyed practicing with native speakers his age. “In a highly contextual language like Japanese, conversations between peers can be different than if I was talking to my professor,” he said.

Through COIL, students are also able to practice conversations in various contexts and through a variety of methods. “They learned to use gestures, visual aids and other nonverbal strategies to ensure mutual understanding,” Itaya said. “This kind of real-world communication training is difficult to replicate in a domestic classroom.”

Yuki Aratake and Dr. Marie Lina Excellent (Submitted Photo)

Tackling public health

Excellent discovered COIL through the Center for Faculty Excellence’s newsletter. As a Fulbright alumna and advocate for global health education, Excellent saw COIL as an innovative way to help her students learn about critical issues in global health.

“I always look for ways to elevate my courses, in teaching and in opportunities for students, and so COIL appeared to be a good opportunity for that,” she said.

Before partnering with two other universities for Excellent’s first COIL course, she traveled to Accra, Ghana, and Manipal, India, to meet the instructors and students in person.

This semester, Excellent paired up with universities in those countries to teach two graduate-level courses, Critical Issues in Global Health and Leading Continuous Quality Improvement in Public Health Locally and Globally. Graduate students from each country analyze each other’s health systems and propose solutions to shared challenges.

After graduation, Excellent’s students are likely to pursue careers analyzing health systems and shaping policy. COIL prepares them to “step into someone else’s shoes and see [their] own system differently,” Excellent said, which will benefit them professionally.

This year, UNC Global Affairs appointed Excellent to be a COIL Faculty Fellow who will mentor colleagues interested in integrating COIL into their own courses.

Aratake and her students partaking in a collaborative class with Nagoya University in 2023. As part of a tourism project, the Japanese and UNC students had to fillet fish together. (Submitted photo)

Adapting classes to COIL

Both professors acknowledge that a successful COIL course requires careful planning. Aratake shifts class times to evenings to accommodate the time difference in Japan and hold synchronous sessions. For Excellent, collaboration is asynchronous, with the class using tools like WhatsApp and Padlet to help students connect. Some might find the adjustments challenging, but Aratake and Excellent agree that COIL is worth doing.

In the future, Aratake plans to bring her students to Japan as part of a COIL Plus course — combining virtual collaboration with an in-person experience — allowing students to meet their peers in person. Excellent is already preparing for both spring and summer COIL courses.