In September 2021, while the COVID-19 pandemic was raging and causing volatile, uncertain and adverse effects in international education, the European Union Support to Higher Education in the ASEAN Region (SHARE) programme launched a new initiative to introduce COIL/VE in the ASEAN region as a part of their digital transformation action in the ASEAN Higher Education Space Roadmap. This constituted a rapid response to a very dynamic situation, as higher education institutions were still negotiating their way forward. Most parts of the world have taken action to adopt virtual student exchange, virtual mobility and COIL/VE to sustain the internationalisation of higher education. Even today, when many parts of the world have reached a more stable phase of the pandemic and physical movement can take place, integration of the online modality within the international education arena has not decelerated.

The SHARE programme began with an initial exploratory study conducted by one of the authors, which can be viewed in a report entitled Mapping and Identification Study of Virtual Exchange Schemes in ASEAN (Ikeda & Ahmad, 2022) published in February 2022. The objective of the study was to identify obstacles to organising virtual exchange, understand the programmes currently offered, and explore the support provided in developing and executing virtual exchange. A survey was distributed to students and university representatives, and interviews were carried out with selected university representatives. The study identified a need to clarify understanding of the concept and terminology of COIL/VE, and that further support in terms of capacity-building workshops was required for the ASEAN region specifically among the SHARE partner university members.

Three rounds of capacity building workshops were conducted, the first in October 2021, the second in March 2022 and the third in August 2022. The first was an introductory workshop to arrive at a common understanding of the basic concepts and terminologies related to COIL/VE, learn about COIL/VE model design and learning impacts, understand evaluation and assessment methods, and provide a place for potential facilitators to meet one another. The second workshop concentrated on community building and learning from examples of COIL/VE across the world, and included more focussed tasks – the academics learned about task design and problem-based learning, while the international relations team learned about internationalisation at home, marketing and networking. The third workshop focussed on introducing the AVEC (ASEAN Virtual Exchange/COIL) Portal and the use of Google Workspace. The AVEC portal acts as a one-stop centre that provide facilitators with a directory of COIL/VE courses offered, video support on how to develop COIL/VE programmes, suggested templates and ideas for a successful COIL/VE programme, reports on the best practices of past COIL/VE organisers and so on.

Attendance at the capacity-building workshops was a pre-requisite for university representatives to initiate the development of COIL/VE programmes at their ASEAN universities. Four batches of COIL/VE programmes were conducted, called Batch Six, Batch Seven, Batch Eight and Batch Nine.

Batch Six included five collaborations involving six universities from the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia. Among the areas or COIL/VE courses offered were Probing Food and Biomolecules, Introduction to Asian Culture, Family Economics Planning and Diversity, Economics, and Operating Systems. Through this kickstart programme, 281 ASEAN university students participated in the collaborations.

Batch Seven comprised twelve collaborations involving ten universities from Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Laos, Indonesia and Vietnam. Among the areas or COIL/VE courses offered were Disaster Nursing, Pattern Recognition/Data Mining, International Economics, and Entrepreneurship. A total of 681 ASEAN university students participated in the program.

Batch Eight included eleven collaborations involving eight universities from Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. Among the areas or COIL/VE courses offered were Human Resource Management, Web Design, and Principles of Management. A total of 514 ASEAN university students participated in the programme. At the time of writing Batch Nine is currently in the selection process, with results expected soon.

Overall, 1,476 students in ASEAN universities have so far been able to experience COIL/VE in their virtual classrooms. Nine of the ten ASEAN countries have participated in the activities, and thirteen universities within the region have actively worked together to bring students and academics together. The SHARE platform has provided an avenue where partnerships between universities were able to be strengthened and sustained during a challenging time when physical exchange was restricted. This success of a COIL/VE programme within the region proves that strong partnerships, proper planning and strategy and the willingness to think and react outside the box may open the door to greater opportunities.

Benefits of International Partnerships through the Online Modality
COIL/VE practices, when they are a part of institutional international partnership endeavours, can bring many benefits. International collaboration accomplishes more through a consortium-like membership rather than through relationships between single institutions. These benefit may be in terms of enriched access to unique human resources, laboratories, research subjects and environments, academics or other experts, and student networks. While an individual university may be able to send a student to just one or two destinations during their campus life, COIL/VE will enable them to experience ten or twelve countries, allowing them to encounter new peers and cultures. An online pedagogy like COIL/VE places emphasis on collaborative learning, in which students will naturally engage well in cross-cultural encounters. While a university may have international students on its campus as exchange students, many local students may not even realise that international students are present on their campus due to large physical spaces or not being in the same faculty.

In the authors’ view, the most valuable benefit from international partnerships through COIL/VE is to realise global learning for HEIs. In the AAC&U Global Learning rubric, global learning is defined as “the critical analysis of and an engagement with complex, interdependent global systems and legacies (such as natural, physical, social, cultural, economic, and political) and their implications for people’s lives and the earth’s sustainability)”. Through global learning, students should: 1) become informed, open-minded, and responsible people who are attentive to diversity across the spectrum of differences; 2) seek to understand how their actions affect both local and global communities; and 3) address the world’s most pressing and enduring issues collaboratively and equitably.

The interdisciplinary nature of COIL/VE practices provide students with a significant opportunity to tackle today’s global challenges. Such opportunities will help to prepare a new generation of students as global citizens. Built on solid cohesion, communication and trust, strong and active international partnerships achieved through COIL/VE are dedicated to making the world a better place.