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Field notes

The work, written down.

Collaborative Online International Learning is easy to describe and hard to run. Field Notes is where we write up partnerships that actually happened, and the practical guidance that helps before you have one of your own.

Case studies

Real partnerships, written up with the faculty who ran them
Case study
Interview in progress

Ohio State and Lovisenberg, Oslo: nursing students comparing two health systems

A partnership between Ohio State University’s College of Nursing and Lovisenberg Diaconal University College in Oslo. In Spring 2024 it ran as a blended course: 32 nursing students in four groups, two travelling to Norway and two working through the online COIL track, comparing how the two health systems serve marginalised populations.

We are currently arranging interviews with the faculty who built and taught it. The write-up will be published once they have had their say — how the two teaching teams structure a shared course across a six-hour time difference, what they would do differently, and what they would tell anyone starting out.

Presented by Tracy Taylor, Unni Jenssen, Jeanie Bochenek and Sara Edwards. “Blending Virtual Learning and Travel Abroad as Teaching Strategies to Develop Global Perspectives”, 36th International Nursing Research Congress, Seattle, 2025. · Read the presentation

Guides

Two published · practical, general, no partnership required

Guides are general practice notes, drawn from published COIL literature and fifteen years designing online international projects. They are not accounts of any one partnership — where a guide does draw on a specific collaboration, it names it and links to the source.

How-to
September 2026

Running your first COIL project

Most of the work happens before a single student joins a call. A general sequence for getting a first collaboration off the ground without it collapsing under its own admin.

  • Agreeing one shared outcome, not two parallel syllabi
  • Aligning academic calendars that genuinely do not match
  • Deciding who grades what, in writing, before week one
  • The minimum viable tech stack — and what to ignore
Read the guide →
Best practice
September 2026

Where COIL partnerships tend to come unstuck

The common failure patterns, and the ones that are mostly fixable with structure agreed up front rather than goodwill applied later.

  • Unclear ownership between two enthusiastic faculty
  • Assessment weighted so unevenly that one cohort disengages
  • No plan for the students who go quiet — and they will
  • Nothing written down, so the partnership leaves when a person does
Read the guide →