UnCOILing the barriers to making international connections through COIL

There has been a sustained move towards internationalisation of higher education, which can be achieved in many ways in Law, especially in relation to the curriculum. However, in relation to physical exchange, there can be a raft of barriers, both institutional (e.g. time, resource, PSRBs, QA processes) and student centric (e.g. finances, caring responsibilities, health issues and the need to be in paid employment), which prevent the majority of law students from making connections through study abroad experiences. Increasing recognition of Internationalisation at Home initiatives, including Collaborative Online International Learning (COILs), might be a more inclusive and administratively simple alternative, although not replacement, to physical exchange. This pre-recording is based on my personal experiences of creating and running an extra-curricular COIL for law students from Kent Law School and the Université de Bordeaux, France for the past 3 academic years. The ambition is to encourage YOU to seize the opportunities that simple technology-facilitated COILs can offer for embedding internationalisation, promoting inclusivity and building community amongst our current and future law student cohorts.