Lebanon-Oswego Class Partnership Springs COIL Forward

Students in Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s “Women, the Workplace and the Law” class interacted online with students in Lebanon in the fall ’12 semester as part of the SUNY-wide Collaborative Online International Learning experience.

Ina Pfeifer Issa, the teacher of a Lebanese course in international management, visited SUNY Oswego this spring to help Coultrap-McQuin share lessons they learned in the college’s first COIL experience. They planned improvements for the next stage of the partnership and worked on shared research projects. Issa also presented at the Ernst & Young Lecture Series.

“The international perspective is the real growth in the COIL experience,” Coultrap-McQuin told faculty and staff at a session in the college’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. “It’s important to learn content, but the other kind of learning is figuring out how to communicate with other people from
another culture who are
second-language speakers.”

COIL, a SUNY-wide initiative headquartered in the system’s Global Center in New York City, advocates cross-cultural learning through classroom partnerships. Oswego has approximately 11 other COIL courses launching or in development across disciplines ranging from human-computer interaction to broadcasting, from education to physics. l

— Jeff Rea ’71

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