Evaluation
Depending on the COIL scenario (Pre/Full), the joint conception, planning and implementation of courses, especially in the international area, are on the one hand associated with special effort. On the other hand, cooperation across national and cultural borders also offers special opportunities for learning experiences and competence development for students and teachers.
Is the effort matched by an adequate benefit? Does the teaching concept support the development of specific competencies in students? Are the planned teaching-learning activities helpful for successful course completion? What about the subjective learning success and satisfaction of the students? Does the course have an impact on physical or virtual mobility?
These and other questions are of particular interest and can guide the evaluation of COIL courses and formats.
Subprojects: Developement of COIL-specific evaluation tools
The uniqueness of each cooperation scenario will ultimately always result in an individual instrument in case of an evaluation need or interest.
However, our goal is to develop standard instruments and elements that will give you guidance in the evaluation of your cooperation project or from which you can create your individual evaluation-instrument without special effort.
In doing so, we will include various already existing methods, approaches and tools, e.g.
- Questionnaires from the course evaluation of the University of Potsdam,
- evaluation schemes and questionnaires from proven COIL projects,
- topic-specific evaluation tools, e.g. International Cross-Cultural Experiential Learning Evaluation Toolkit.
For the evaluation of COIL courses, both the following guiding questions and the possible areas of interest provide a good starting point.
Guiding questions for the evaluation design:
- Why is the evaluation being conducted?
- What exactly is to be evaluated?
- When is the evaluation to take place?
- Who is evaluating?
- How will the evaluation be conducted? What method is to be used?
Areas of interest for the evaluation of COIL courses.
The focus and scope of COIL evaluations differ depending on their purpose and especially on the scenario to be evaluated. The final evaluation of a one-time, very limited-time collaboration (Pre-COIL) might be aimed more at more general feedback on satisfaction and subjective assessments of learning successfulness. In the case of Full-COIL events, which may also be converted into regular offerings, the topics of interest are likely to be broader. Both the development of competences, the design and the benefit of the course or the activities as well as the use of digital tools can be included here.
