Prof. Dr. Renate Link
TH Aschaffenburg / Aschaffenburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany
About
Renate Link is a professor at the Faculty of Business Administration and Law and the vice head of the Language Centre of Aschaffenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany where she teaches business English and intercultural communication. She graduated from two universities in Munich & Passau University with a Ph.D. in British cultural studies, English literature and economics. She is also the founder and leader of the Institute for Intercultural Communication at her university and the co-head of the regional chapter Frankfurt-Rhine-Main-Lower Franconia of SIETAR Germany. Her current research focuses on cross-cultural COIL & gamification, the Nordic countries and, last but not least, Asia.Sessions
On-line presentation (research report on practice and activities) (30 minutes) Asian-European COIL Revisited: Why think small when you can do BIG X-Culture COIL? more
Sat, Nov 27, 14:40-15:10 Asia/Tokyo
This presentation will deal with a best-practice example of the successful large-scale application of this year’s conference motto “collaboration and leadership in intercultural contexts” in higher education with a special focus and Asia and Europe. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), student teams from a German university were asked to design and pilot COIL (collaborative online international learning) activities with altogether seven Asian partner countries (including Japan) and eleven participating Asian universities (three of these being Japanese ones), targeting students and teaching staff from both regions (Asia and Europe). The COIL’s topic needed to be in line with the master course’s learning outcomes relating to intercultural communication and collaboration such as virtual team work and leadership across cultures in challenging times etc. Regarding the collaborative live online session, student teams were free to choose an approach they considered suitable and which allowed the integration of online collaborative tools encountered in class or beyond thanks also to their peers in Asia (e.g. video, quizzes, games etc.). The students’ seminar papers also built on this practical contribution by drawing on a suitable theoretical body of cultural approaches and frameworks encountered throughout the term. How such a major COIL project can be conducted successfully and to what extent it can serve as a direct contribution to promoting mutual understanding in the area of education and training between Asia and Europa in challenging times will be discussed in this presentation. Project success factors and pitfalls will be outlined and the results of a comprehensive post-COIL survey on the project’s impact on students’ cross-cultural skills in their role of future co-workers and company leaders will be presented.
On-line presentation (research presentation) (30 Minutes) COIL 2.0 – From COIL to the Development of a Cross-Cultural Emblems Game more
Sun, Nov 28, 15:50-16:20 Asia/Tokyo
As the pandemic continues, most university students are still unable to study or even travel abroad. As a result, the importance of collaborative online international learning (COIL) with foreign HEIs has increased. A joint Asian-European COIL project by a Japanese, Taiwanese and a German university was enhanced in 2021 to allow students to interact with international peers. The accompanying COIL research began in spring 2020 during the first two COILs and has continued since the third COIL in May 2021. Prior to the live online COIL 2.0 session in spring 2021, students were put in teams and asked for self-introductions across universities on an asynchronous whiteboard (https://padlet.com/). Using English as a lingua franca, students were assigned two preparatory tasks: the first one was to introduce an idiom, saying or proverb describing their culture-specific communication style, and the second one was to present and illustrate a frequently used emoji or sticker not common in the other two countries. All findings were documented on shared padlets as well. The students were given a pre- and post-COIL-survey on what they learned from their international fellows. One learning outcome showed that there are various culture-bound idioms and phrases that describe a "good" communication style. Furthermore, students were able to identify similar values related to communication styles in all three countries. The responses also indicate that students realised that the same emoji can be associated with totally different meanings in other cultures. To gather more data, additional COIL sessions with students from different nationalities across the globe, also in the framework of hybrid short intensive periods, will be organised. How the material on emblems collected during the COIL e-meeting and the results from the pre- and post-survey can serve as a pilot for developing a card game (e.g. for Diversophy), will be outlined in this presentation.