UDP Internacional

2 November 2022

On Friday, October 28, the first session of the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project was held at the Faculty of Education of the Diego Portales University. This project was submitted to the General Directorate of International Relations by the academician Felipe Kong, who received the Fund for the Internationalization of Learning Processes to develop it jointly with the University of Girona (UdG), from Catalonia.

COIL is a pedagogical approach that allows for a virtual exchange within a subject and adds an international focus within the training of the course. This project will be carried out by around 30 second year Pedagogy students in Basic General Education from the UDP and 14 male and female students from the European university.

From the UDP, in addition to Felipe Kong, the person in charge of the course will be Professor Felipe Calderón, coordinator of the COIL project, while his peer from Spain will be Professor Marta Gual Oliva. “The objective of the project is to make this virtual exchange within the COIL project that the university has and make these students live the experience of knowing other realities. While the pandemic confined us, it also allowed us to develop tools that allow us to cross physical borders. Now we can perfectly do this project through Zoom or other platforms,” said Calderón.

“The important thing is that they are able to live the experience of meeting students from another region, from another country, and that they can see that both are training as teachers and both may have the same problems, the same obstacles and that they themselves can start to develop and generate instances and tools that allow them to solve these obstacles that they face in their teacher training”, added the coordinator of the COIL project.

The course will be given over a month and will consist of researching problematic issues on migration and/or the environment from the pedagogical field. The students of both countries will work asynchronously and autonomously, that is, without the explicit instructions of their tutors and agreeing with each other. This work will be exposed through Instagram, where the dissemination of the research carried out will be exposed and shares. Finally, on December 2, the courses will meet again and present the conclusions of their results. Both UDP and UdG students will receive a certificate for their participation in this virtual exchange.

With a “Good morning Chile, good afternoon Spain”, due to the difference of five hours that exists between the countries, Kong presented the project to the class, which was divided into the Portalian student body in room 302 of the Faculty of Education and Professor Gual’s pupils connected via Zoom. “I am very excited to see what will happen. Despite the distance, I already feel a climate of desire to see the results that we are going to have”, commented the academic.

“The biggest challenge is being able to make the technological adjustment, where face-to-face and virtual use, at the same time, has been complex. We believe that perhaps the issue of the time difference could eventually create some inconveniences, but we are going to adapt and, for now, everything has worked well. Especially, what we wanted is that they could communicate, share, argue and exchange about ways of life that we have both in Chile and in Girona”, said Kong at the end of the session.