Examining students’ reflections on a collaborative online international learning project in an ICLHE context

Abstract

This paper explores students’ reflections towards the application of language and content, along with cross-disciplinary skills and cultural awareness, when participating in the Virtual Business Professional (VBP) international project. It examines the experience of 23 learners, from different nationalities, enrolled in a business-related master’s degree. This experience combines the ICLHE (Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education) and the COIL approaches (Collaborative Online International Learning). The study has been conducted through a mixed methods perspective based on two questionnaires, distributed to all participating students before and after the project, together with follow-up semi-structured interviews to four students. Students were asked about their expectations (before) and perceptions (after) from the VBP project, respectively. Results support the view that this project applying a COIL approach may help students to consolidate their master’s degree training and gain self-confidence when applying their knowledge in a real experience. The combination of these two approaches, ICLHE and COIL, seem to benefit students since they have used everything learnt and feel that the master’s degree contents are widely implemented in the VBP project. However, results also reveal that students’ expectations were higher than their final perceptions, which leads to pedagogical implications at the local and global level.