Building Bridges Across Cultures

Using Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) in the Sport Management Classroom

Abstract

Sport managers and sport industry professionals must understand how to operate in an ever-evolving, global sport marketplace, and this can be initiated through education and curriculum development (LeCrom & Naylor, 2020). More specifically, the area within global learning that has been applied to the field of sport management in this category is Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). A project incorporating the principles of COIL involves a virtual exchange or telecollaboration whereby faculty members from separate institutions in different parts of the world use online technology to facilitate student collaboration to increase intercultural competencies. In this study, the authors implement a COIL project from the creation of learning outcomes and defining the details of the project, to determining the deliverables and evaluation rubrics. The authors followed Bank’s (2003) Transformation Approach for the integration of multicultural content into a curriculum. The curricular setting for this project is a collaboration between a sport and legal issues course (United States) and a business marketing course (Ecuador) with a focus on the COIL concept to garner student collaboration in the area of personal brand building of student-athletes in the collegiate athletic context.