Fostering First Year University Students’ Engagementand Autonomy: Lessons from a COIL Virtual Exchange between HKBU and CCP

This presentation examines the design, implementation, and challenges of a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) virtual exchange between year-one undergraduates in their first semester at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and year-one business students at the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP). Over one semester, students completed a sequence of COIL activities: asynchronous video introductions, an initial synchronous Zoom icebreaker, two student-organized small-group meetings, and a final synchronous group presentation. While the opening and closing sessions were completed successfully, many students struggled to move from participation in whole-class tasks to sustained collaboration in small groups. This difficulty reflected the participants’ stage of academic development as much as the exchange design itself. Participating students were at the beginning of their university journey, with little prior teamwork experience and no experience navigating telecollaboration. They were asked to coordinate across linguistic barriers, a 12-hour time-zone difference, and unfamiliar digital tools, yet the support structure assumed a level of self-management they had not yet developed. As a result, the two intermediate small group meetings, intended to deepen intercultural interaction, did not take place successfully for many groups. What looked like simple scheduling issues revealed a more complex set of barriers: uncertainty about how to begin a group conversation online, hesitation about speaking in English without preparation, uneven confidence with digital platforms, and limited understanding of how to sustain distributed teamwork across institutions. These challenges point to the need for stronger scaffolding for students who are only just beginning their academic journey. In this project, the lesson is not that year-one students cannot collaborate internationally, but that they require more deliberate guidance to do so productively. Future programmes will provide closer faculty collaboration across institutions, including bi-weekly check-ins to remind students of collaborative project tasks, clarify expectations, and help them maintain momentum between synchronous sessions. Telecollaboration meeting times will be alternated according to time-zones to facilitate more equitable exchanges. At the same time, the difficulties encountered in this COIL project should be understood as part of the learning process. Every failure provides an opportunity to improve programme design, not only for faculties but also for students, who can begin to see telecollaboration as a professional skill that should be learned, practiced, and revised. For faculty, the experience underscores the importance of aligning tasks, timing, and communication routines with students’ developmental needs. For students, it offers an early lesson in resilience, responsibility, and intercultural teamwork. With better scaffolding, more coordinated faculty support, and explicit reminders of task-related responsibilities, virtual exchange can become a more accessible and meaningful experience for students at the start of their university education.