Why Distance Learning?

Allyson (00:00.177)
See ya!

Seth Fleischauer (00:03.812)
Hello everyone. And welcome to why distance learning the podcast, the challenges, misconceptions about live virtual education. I'm Seth Fleishauer, founder and president of Banning global learning. And my co-hosts are Tammy mooring and Alison Mitchell of the center for interactive learning and collaboration or C I L C. Hello ladies. Together, we bring you real stories, expert insights and research back strategies that uncover the true impact of distance learning in today's world.

Tami Moehring (00:21.198)
Hello.

Seth Fleischauer (00:30.478)
And today we're exploring a part of distance learning that rarely gets attention, but could redefine global education, which are virtual international collaborations. Global learning isn't limited to travel anymore. More educators are proving that powerful cross-cultural experiences can happen inside ordinary courses between classrooms, a world apart. The real question is how to design these exchanges. they're truly transformative. guest has spent years helping educators do just that.

connecting students across countries and languages to learn with one another. Just sorry, Lucas.

Allyson (01:06.631)
We're grateful for you. Sorry.

Seth Fleischauer (01:08.282)
Connecting students, we are grateful. are grateful. Connecting students across countries and languages to learn with one another, not just about one another. We'll look at what authentic collaboration requires, why it matters for equity and access, and when learning might actually be better at a distance. But first, Tammy, could you please introduce our guest?

Tami Moehring (01:32.898)
I would be happy to. Hope is the director of SUNY Coil.

Seth Fleischauer (01:36.954)
Sorry. Can I stop you? I have not said her name yet. So can you see her full name? That was my bad. It wasn't. Yeah. It wasn't in my thing.

Allyson (01:42.277)
Thank you again, Lucas.

Hope Windle (01:44.286)
It's Wendell like Swindle.

Tami Moehring (01:46.498)
That's what I thought, but now you threw me because that was one word I was gonna omit Seth because I was afraid I was in a butcher last night. Hope Wendell is the director of SUNY COIL, State University of New York Collaborative Online International Learning, amplifying 225 global partner institutions, connecting 20,000 plus students annually in 32 countries on six continents.

Seth Fleischauer (01:52.002)
All right. Sorry. We're back.

Tami Moehring (02:14.668)
She leads SUNY COIL as a pedagogic approach for social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, incorporating UN sustainable development goals, applied learning approaches, as well as involving NGOs and industry. She facilitates professional development for the COIL community of instructor practitioners and administrators. She speaks internationally on the value of digitally enhanced culturally focused student team-based projects.

that an act's changed locally and globally. Hope SUNY Coil has a huge imprint in the space of online student collaboration, something that is a dear to our hearts on this podcast. For those who don't know what is SUNY Coil and how, for those who don't know what is SUNY Coil and how did you find yourself as its director?

Hope Windle (03:07.499)
everybody. I'm really happy to be here. so SUNY or how I got involved in this was through being an instructional designer at a small community college in the Hudson Valley in New York. I came from Ed Tech in Silicon Valley and I found myself among a bunch of professors and students who were in a rural environment.

Seth Fleischauer (03:09.328)
You

Hope Windle (03:36.78)
And I saw someone demo what could be Coil, which was looking at students in Belarus and students in SUNY Purchase College, and they were all filmmaking together. And the students got this opportunity to do, to finish each other's films.

And how it all started was a professor, John Rubin, had a Fulbright. And when he came back to his classroom, his students were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's sort of peanuts, wah, wah, wah. But as soon as he started showing these movies that his students had made in Belarus, his students in New York were like, my God, what are they doing? I wanna play.

Allyson (04:13.767)
you

Hope Windle (04:29.739)
And so for me as an instructional designer, which means I work with faculty across campus, helping them use all these great technology tools that we all know about that they don't necessarily know about and they know the content. And so I sort of be a little bit of a doula to, okay, how about this? And with COIL, it was a great Trojan horse because you have this opportunity to connect.

Allyson (04:51.847)
You

Hope Windle (04:59.819)
across culturally, you have an opportunity for the students to be hands-on in a project across borders, and you get to connect joyfully with people from somewhere else in the world. And so, and the students come out of it more digitally professional, let's say, especially as we know in COVID when people showed up in all kinds of outfits and situations and locations.

Allyson (05:26.097)
Mm-hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (05:28.1)
you

Hope Windle (05:29.961)
I don't know if we want to get into details. But yeah, messy bed and perhaps like a like a person underneath the covers in there too. mean, like really kind of crazy. Anyway, it was this great opportunity for people to sort of expand and blow their minds and and

Allyson (05:32.891)
messy beds in the background, you know?

Allyson (05:42.055)
Yes!

happening.

Hope Windle (05:58.378)
gain some maturity about how to work with somebody from another culture, which we all do every day, but we don't really think about it when it's up close. But when you're connecting with somebody a million miles away, all of a sudden it's like, my gosh, they might do things a little differently than me. So that's how I got involved.

Seth Fleischauer (06:22.52)
Yeah, I, I love that illustration of the Y right. You talked a lot about, the importance of these types of interactions, collaborative online, international learning that is coil. That's an acronym. You do coil at SUNY and you are one of like the big authorities in this type of teaching. but break it down for us. What exactly is a.

Hope Windle (06:36.617)
Yeah. Yes.

Seth Fleischauer (06:47.472)
Coil collaboration, opposed to just like any sort of connection, like mystery Skype, right? Like coil isn't mystery Skype. So, so what is coil?

Hope Windle (06:58.129)
So I'm going to share my screen if I can. Would that be okay?

Seth Fleischauer (07:01.732)
Sure. And we will narrate what you're sharing for our listeners.

Allyson (07:01.755)
Yay!

Hope Windle (07:05.631)
Okay.

Allyson (07:06.117)
And you can also go to the YouTube and you can see these if you'd like to on the YouTube recording.

Hope Windle (07:11.689)
Yeah. So here's a picture of a three week project. So how this works is that the students meet each other. And in this case, we use Padlet, but you could use Google Classroom. You could use Canvas. You could use Moodle. When we first started, we were using the Learning Management System, the LMS.

of our partners. our students would first see Cyrillic and then they would toggle to English to get into a collaboration. They first get to know each other depending on how long it is. In this case, this visual is for three weeks, but it could be as short as two weeks or even a week. But

it depends, you know, the intensity of that. And then, so the first thing about it is that they're getting to know each other. And then they are put into teams. And in those teams, they work on something tough. And in this case, it was students on Long Island and students in Caracas, Venezuela. And they were talking about

food insecurity and how food insecurity leads to chronic disease and what do we do about it? And the students in Long Island at Suffolk University were in a pre-college program learning their science study skills. So super basic objective to learn their study skills, but also to learn about each other.

And the students in Caracas were ending their college experience. They were seniors and they were communication majors. And they spoke Spanish as their native language. And the USers on Long Island spoke English as their native language. And the collaboration took place in English.

Hope Windle (09:26.453)
Another example could be, I don't know if you want me to jump in or I could stop for a sec. Do you have questions about so far?

Seth Fleischauer (09:34.586)
no, please keep going.

Allyson (09:35.227)
Yeah, please.

Hope Windle (09:36.222)
Okay, so another example of a collaboration could be someone in Brazil. Let's say in this case, Ana Cecilia, she's at University Porto Alegre, and she's a journalist professor. She starts her semester in August, but the collaboration actually happens at the end of September, beginning of October.

towards the end of her semester. Her partner, Claudia, is teaching future teachers how to be math teachers. Can I say teacher one more time? And she's located at the University of Potsdam in Germany. They come together in English to work.

Seth Fleischauer (10:20.41)
You

Hope Windle (10:30.887)
And for her, for Claudia, it's a project in learning more about what they're doing in terms of visualizing from different perspectives data. And the first week, they have an intro session of learning to know each other and team building. And then the second and third week, they're in self-organized teams working on data sets.

and then the fourth week they present. And for the most part, the students are working asynchronously in their teams. They might meet hybridly because we know our students live on their phone. And so that's where they're probably in Signal, Discord, WeChat, or WhatsApp, or they're in Google Docs, or they're in

a learning management system that was put together by one or both of the professors. So there's another example. I don't know how many more, but I just want to say that the point of this is not content mastery. It's about how much working across culture impacts how you work in general and how to bring

your content into that conversation. So whether you're talking about journalism or broadcasting or artificial intelligence in Spanish, and you're thinking about smart technologies, you're taking your content area and your partner's content area and you're really recreating what happens to all of us when we work on teams across cultures.

on and we come from our different points of view. So in some cases, like in this one, we have astrophysicists, graduate level students at University of Sonora in Mexico, and they were connected with community college students at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. And the students together created an asteroid tracking app.

Hope Windle (12:54.567)
So they wanted to follow big data. The students in Valencia College were baby programmers learning how to make an app. And so they came together with the astrophysicist graduate students as the subject matter expert client. You can also do travel with COIL. so basically in a nutshell, you're taking two courses.

Seth Fleischauer (12:54.916)
Mm-hmm.

Hope Windle (13:22.985)
and you're doing a project that can be a project in both of the classes together. So I think that's probably all you want to know for now, and I'll stop sharing. That's probably a fire hose of info.

Seth Fleischauer (13:34.846)
Heheheh... Ayy-

Allyson (13:39.623)
and

Seth Fleischauer (13:40.075)
Yeah, I want to, I want to kind of distill the fire hose into it. Just a nice normal hose, which would, would say that, your, your Suny coil is essentially a matchmaker. You are, bringing, giving opportunities for, people who are interested in having collaborative experiences to come together, meet, identify points of overlap between their course work that they could potentially build into a program. And then given the.

variety and breadth of examples you just showed us. What we can assume is that any given coil collaboration might look pretty different from any other given coil collaboration because you are, creating that co-creating that between two educators who might have different curricular needs, pedagogical needs, scheduling needs. so.

The example of the students working on food insecurity and communicating over Padlet is obviously quite different from students who are creating a, an asteroid tracking app together. but it all has that component of like we are in teams and we're working on stuff together. but something you said was really interesting to me, which was that it's, it's not, it's what the purpose of the program is, is not.

Allyson (14:45.86)
So amazing.

Seth Fleischauer (15:02.936)
necessarily what they're learning in the moment, but it's more about the process, the process of taking your knowledge and skills into a room where there is someone else from some different culture. And in this case, that culture might have national borders associated with it, but you can imagine all sorts of situations where someone comes from another culture than you, even if that person is in the exact same country as you are currently we have.

me in Oregon and Alison in Pennsylvania and Tammy in Minnesota. Those are three distinct cultures, but even within Oregon, there are distinct distinct cultures and subcultures of people that, right. That was, that seemed like an informed, yeah, you just gave me, but

Hope Windle (15:41.807)
yeah.

Allyson (15:42.49)
Yeah.

Allyson (15:47.047)
was gonna say, we can, yeah, Philadelphia over here too. So don't worry. It's sets of behavior that connect groups of people.

Seth Fleischauer (15:55.185)
So, so you're talking about that process and I wonder if you can break that down a little bit more and tell us like, what is the real benefit of coming into a space like this and navigating some of these cross-cultural headwinds? What are you hoping to get out of this for students when the experience is so varied, but you've obviously done so many thousands of these or facilitated so many thousands of these over the years. Like what are the benefits you're seeing coming out of these experiences that are.

people to be able to have more of these cross-cultural connections.

Hope Windle (16:27.679)
In a nutshell, I would say the benefits we are seeing and we're connecting with NACE, which is the National Association of Colleges and Entrepreneurs. Students are coming out of this with an increased level of maturity. They're coming out of it with an increased sense of their own humility about

Perhaps they don't know as much as they thought they did. In the US, our media has saturated the airwaves with these assumptions about other that are really offensive and wrong. And when students actually participate in these collaborations, their minds are blown because the people that they're collaborating with

in some cases have, know, we all love Beyonce. Who doesn't love Beyonce? Or, you know, you have a little doggie at home too? So do I. So there are these similarities that we have and there are these differences that we have. And what we see is this elevated awareness of the world.

Allyson (17:34.225)
Yes!

Hope Windle (17:55.936)
When students are put into a collaboration with students like in Venezuela who are dealing with structural violence, where they don't necessarily know how much money they're going to have the next month or how much food they're going to have. Or Ukraine, we have a consortium of schools that we work with in Ukraine where the students are dealing with really intense stuff every day.

But not only that, the benefits are just, I have all kinds of stories that I can tell. Is this a good time for some stories of some students? Okay. And I could show this my screen so that you see text too, if that would help. Here we go.

Seth Fleischauer (18:36.592)
Health story, yes.

Allyson (18:37.53)
Yeah!

Allyson (18:48.401)
Just reminders, so we will say what we are looking at, but you can also go to our YouTube and you can check out what we're seeing on our full video.

Hope Windle (18:59.069)
So one student was a college president. She was the school student president and she had done COIL with students from Sao Paulo, Brazil in a business class. And she went on to finish her studies at SUNY-Delhi and asked the professors, why don't you do this? This is gonna help me understand what international business is. Another student told his professor,

he got into the graduate program that he was excelling at because he had worked in an international student team, doing COIL. Another student told me that doing COIL made all of the content come to life, that he didn't realize that the videos that he sent to his Belarussian partner would be censored, the YouTube videos.

and that trying to create an entrepreneurial business in Belarus was not something his teammates were able to do. Another student, both in the US and India, wanted to travel abroad, but when they did COIL, they felt more comfortable because now they knew people. They built and expanded their social network and their social capital. They now wanted to visit the

the place where their teammates were. And so we had a biology student who went to visit their partner in Mexico and now they're still friends. And another student was able to talk and play World of Warcraft as a way to do ice breaking with his partner. And they've never met face to face. Another student shares.

Allyson (20:36.613)
Yes!

Hope Windle (20:45.771)
how as an administrator at an elementary school in the Bronx, that she uses the skills that she got from doing COIL every day in her workplace. And one of my favorite stories was another student who was a green card holder. She was from Honduras and she had heard all of her life that people from Latin America and especially Mexicans were drug runners and thugs.

And she believed that unconsciously all her life until she was in Coyle classroom with her design class with students from Mexico City at Universidad La Salle. And in that project, she saw her teammates, her Mexican teammates as designers, as professional designers.

that went on to work at multinational companies like Google. And they were doing incredible creative professional work. And before Coyle, she didn't believe it was possible for her to have that kind of a goal and for her to keep going, to dream and inspire to do this kind of stuff. I also wanted to just say that these are projects. These are not programs.

Coil overall is a program at a particular school, but any one of these things is a project within a course. And the professors are not grading each other. They're just grading their own students. And I also want to say that there's one umbrella structure that many collaborations use, and I'll stop sharing for a sec. And that's the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Seth Fleischauer (22:27.054)
Hmm.

Hope Windle (22:43.027)
And those goals are all over the world. And they're a great entry point, especially if one group of students and the professors teaching maybe economics and the other ones teaching chemistry, they can still come together and talk about like water and whether or not the water is clean and how to handle that. So.

What's really nice is that any course with any courts can sort of do a plug and play.

Allyson (23:17.784)
The best thing about collaboration, right? Like come together and we can find the areas where the connection happens, the topics are there, or the project just evolves from it. At CALC, we've worked really hard to create collaboration opportunities that span across different countries. And your framework is just so strong. It sounds like you have such a great opportunity to do project-based learning.

Hope Windle (23:23.111)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hope Windle (23:28.35)
Right.

Allyson (23:43.505)
But again, it's so great to hear that the emphasis isn't on the grade, it's about the experience, the experience points you're getting for life, but also how that comes back to you in the project and being able to work with individuals. And as we look forward, this is a medium that is more and more connected to our work culture, not just our schooling culture or individuals that are interested in going to take that opportunity to connect.

Hope Windle (24:02.027)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Allyson (24:12.231)
having done collaborations and working with K-12 schools to continuing education groups to higher ed groups, there are some logistical situations that come up, especially when you're talking on time zones. Sometimes even Tammy and Seth can tell you about how we're trying to figure out how Eastern, Central and Pacific times all work. And that's all in the same nation. So I do wonder

When you have so many classes doing projects too, I love that you emphasize the idea of it's a program is coil, but the projects are what is driving your program. I just wonder for those that are listening, if they wanna set up a cross cultural collaboration using this medium in their classroom, because we have K-12 to higher ed listening.

Hope Windle (24:50.304)
Right.

Allyson (25:01.275)
When you're spanning cultures, time zones, even institutions, if you're bringing in different outside experts or schools or universities, are there anything that you see that often come up to derail a collaboration? And could you share like how educators could avoid them? I know for Tammy and I, we've done some work on framework to try to help mitigate some things, but it'd be wonderful to hear all about how.

Hope Windle (25:01.707)
Right?

Allyson (25:29.795)
much your framework accounts for that.

Hope Windle (25:34.763)
So my answer might not agree with you, but what I want to say is that I don't want educators to avoid the pitfalls.

Allyson (25:45.873)
Yes!

Seth Fleischauer (25:46.0)
Hmph.

Hope Windle (25:47.574)
They happen, Murphy's law, the cultures, the time zones. Our students after COVID have a really hard time when things fall apart. And so how about having them be in a coach situation with a facilitator, with the professors holding their hands to figure out how to recover when

a microaggression happens when a time zone is misunderstood because of daylight savings or whatever. And so you miss a meeting. You will never forget that when that happens. When, absolutely not. And it does, it absolutely does. you know, and when you have task oriented people working with relationship oriented people,

Allyson (26:27.399)
Daylight Savings.

Seth Fleischauer (26:30.064)
Doesn't mean it won't happen again, but yeah.

Allyson (26:33.551)
Yeah

Hope Windle (26:47.051)
high context communication versus low context communication, you obviously are gonna have some miscommunication happen. And that to me is where the grace happens, where it comes to life and where our students have to wade through the river of not knowing and have to figure it out and get to the other side.

We've had collaborations completely fall apart because in Durban, South Africa, they experienced a huge flood and which knocked out power for a number of days and people didn't know what was going on. Or we had a cyber attack at Cal State Stanislaw and they couldn't communicate by email. They couldn't communicate. They had forgotten to set up their WhatsApp before it started. So the students and the professors

in Mexico thought they had been ghosted and they hadn't. It was just this huge cyber attack. So to me, it's like, we need to prepare our students for when things fall apart. So yeah, there are these common pitfalls. And I think the biggest common pitfall is that professors don't have the flexibility to recover with their students and to set the example and model.

Allyson (27:46.619)
no.

Hope Windle (28:12.543)
how much they need to be flexible for their students. And to also remember, so much of this really should be put on the students to work in their own student teams as opposed to the mama bird regurgitating the food and putting it into the baby bird's mouth. This is really for them to fall off and to have that thing fall apart and to help them.

Allyson (28:28.522)
I'm

Hope Windle (28:43.083)
how to pick it up. So.

Allyson (28:45.255)
so wonderful. It's such a great model too to say like, we're not afraid of the challenges because that's really life, right? You can do as much planning, but the universe will always laugh at your plans in a lot of situations. The universe has a wider plan that we're just not adhered to in certain situations. And I think that that's also a skill set that you need, especially professionally as you're moving into the professional world. There are things that are just going to fall apart. You can do everything logistically.

Hope Windle (28:58.205)
yeah!

Allyson (29:14.151)
theoretically and then in practice you just realize, okay, we need to figure out that framework or we need to be prepared to say mistakes are how we learn or however you need to get through whatever mantra you need to put through to see how you learn from whatever pitfall there may be. But I do wonder because that is especially in a

where instant gratification is something that's at the top of our fingertips. There's not a lot of time to wonder. Or the idea of thinking about not being able to connect. I can say Tammy and I have many times been like, Zoom must be out. We're researching everything on why we can't get a virtual connection should those days come up. So that's not always the easiest thing to handle. So I do wonder with your instructors in place,

How do you prepare them? Is there anything that you do to help them feel okay in those moments of, you know, take a breath, the technology is great when it works type moment? And how do you, with how you prepare them, trust that they're going to help support a genuine collaboration?

Hope Windle (30:11.456)
Yeah.

Hope Windle (30:27.371)
Right. So, SUNY Quill does a lot of professional development, honestly. And in our workshops, it's not me, wah, wah, wah, the peanuts teacher just, just, wah, wah, wah. We actually do stuff together in Zoom. We actually role play. I was telling you earlier, like my...

Cameron works, so was an avatar for a bit. I have them practice that. I have them connect on WhatsApp. I have them do all the things that they're gonna expect their students to do. I think it's really important for them to practice all of it because when you're a teacher in the front of the classroom, you really need to have your stuff together and it's very hard to

Seth Fleischauer (31:00.868)
Hmm.

Hope Windle (31:24.595)
sort of let that down a little bit and be okay that things might not work as planned. And also to bring some play into it, to like have a little bit of like, boop, I just want to poke the Pillsbury doughboy tummy and say, you know, we don't have it all together all the time. And maybe that's okay. And for college professors, woo.

Allyson (31:40.581)
you

Allyson (31:53.479)
The scariest.

Hope Windle (31:54.262)
That's probably the most scariest thing that you could ever suggest to them. So to me, those are more of the common pitfalls. And also when a professor thinks that they need to lecture their partner students, as opposed to giving the reins over to the students, those are the pitfalls that I see that really are the ones that I'm like, ugh.

Allyson (32:21.351)
Let's draw this one back a little bit.

Hope Windle (32:22.676)
No! no!

Hope Windle (32:28.788)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (32:28.89)
I love, I love everything you're saying. You know, I was excited for this conversation because I know that you have such a deep, level of experience with this, work, has been so dear to our hearts. As Tammy said at the top, we're currently with Banyan global learning. We're facilitating a coil collaboration, within your network, and are super excited for what's that, what that is bringing for the school that we work with in Taipei.

Hope Windle (32:45.408)
Huh?

Allyson (32:53.351)
Yay!

Seth Fleischauer (32:54.26)
and one of the things that we like to do on this podcast is to bring in previous ideas and see how our current guests respond to them. I'm excited to hear your point of view again, because of this deep experience, but Tammy, could you please tee up that section for us?

Tami Moehring (33:10.424)
I'd be happy to. And past episodes, guests like Lori Wiggins and Heather Rhodes emphasized that virtual and hybrid learning can meet the vastly different needs of students who are disengaged, displaced, or underserved, and can even foster academic excellence, cultural competence, and learner autonomy. Based on COIL's global outreach and equity mission, how often do you see COIL opening doors for students who would other lot

of who would otherwise lack access to global exchange.

And then to kind of expand on it a little bit, there are groups for whom coil works especially well or doesn't, and what factors kind of determine that.

Hope Windle (33:45.813)
So yeah, go ahead.

Hope Windle (34:01.008)
either groups that work, which really it was, okay.

All right, so I'm going to read a little bit from a beautiful speech that was put together by one of my colleagues who is, her name is Abigail Bryant, and she runs our education opportunity program at throughout SUNY for all 64 campuses. And we were presenting together at a conference with a group of Brazilians and Americans.

And I'm trying to think where else. Anyway, so she said, the importance of centering the students and providing a guide towards student agency. We want to challenge listeners of this podcast to reposition virtual exchange as a necessary tool for all students to engage in critical hope. Critical hope reflects the ability to

Allyson (34:54.887)
Yes.

Hope Windle (35:07.957)
realistically assess one's environment. Here, I'll share what I'm saying so that if you want to read this.

Hope Windle (35:20.875)
Critical hope reflects the ability to realistically assess one's environment through a lens of equity and justice while envisioning the possibility for a better future. That was a quote from 2017. Whether in the beginning or the end of our students' college experience, virtual exchange

Hope Windle (35:48.876)
is an affordance to guide students towards conquering fear with deep learning addressing the sustainability of our planet. We all know that academia falls short of providing all students with the opportunity to engage in all that higher education has to offer. As educators, we must center community and global connections in our classroom if we hope to address

our changing environment and shifting societal values. I'm just gonna make this a little bit bigger. The need for virtual exchange is urgent as we look towards inclusion and a broadening of perspectives. Those students who are often excluded from internationalization are also the most impacted and vulnerable to the devastation of climate change.

international health crises, and other socioeconomic challenges worldwide. It is imperative that we ensure access to virtual exchange as a tool to guide students to critical hope. Aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, virtual exchange creates a space, a space to envision a future where we can protect the planet and the people

each reliant on the success of the other and to engage through a lens that centers equity and justice. This is the last line and I'll shut up. Virtual exchange is a tool for equity and inclusion as well as critical thinking, autonomy, reciprocity, communication skills and intercultural competence. And this was a quote from

Allyson (37:26.532)
No!

Hope Windle (37:44.79)
Teo, who is a great author that talks about decolonizing education, and he said, we need to focus on building and rebuilding rooms, not on regulating traffic within and between them. Coil is resistance.

Hope Windle (38:06.353)
It has the ability to build a new room where everyone is welcome, every voice is heard, and every perspective is collaboratively explored. Ooh, I get a little teary about this. It's just intense.

Allyson (38:25.447)
Oh my goodness. It's so, beautiful words. Thank you so much for sharing. it's virtual exchanges really, I mean, we talk about it a lot at CILC, how important they are. We even think about it in the K-12 classroom. I think only 5 % of virtual exchange happen in the K-12 arena. And it's like the sooner that, especially with mediums like this, when you can break down those barriers, you can transcend space and time.

being able to utilize this and leverage it to help create those global citizens. It's just, it's right there. And those words are so beautifully put what the global classroom can truly be.

Hope Windle (39:07.423)
Yeah, I really love this idea of coil as resistance.

Seth Fleischauer (39:12.686)
Yeah. And I, I, we can feel and hear obviously how deeply you feel this work. the title of the podcast is, is a, is an expression of our values. because in asking this question, why distance learning? We, what we uncover is the true benefit of this technology, which a lot of people just think of as an afterthought.

but we know better and we have people on the podcast to illustrate how profound these connections can be. and, we've heard it throughout your, your stories here today. but if we were to ask you this question, the title of the podcast, what would you say? Hope Wendell, why distance learning?

Hope Windle (40:11.541)
You know, there's something very profound that happens when you give people a chance to reflect. And I think that distance learning, being asynchronous and synchronous, like that you have this hybrid opportunity to reflect and then to also gather and have that joy of seeing each other. To me is

is I want to say the future, but it's now. And it's this beautiful place that allows for multiple languages and multiple cultures to grow together. there's, I've used the word grace a couple of times today, and I feel that it's part of distance learning too, because that moment to pause and

to reflect on how you want to respond or how you want to tee up something or how you want to participate instead of, I mean, I am one to like come to something and like, blah, blah, blah. And then I've kind of sometimes want to like, whoop, I want to rewind what I just said. Yes, these are very technical terms. And so I...

Allyson (41:30.247)
You

Seth Fleischauer (41:34.948)
These are technical terms.

Hope Windle (41:41.964)
I definitely need help in reminding myself, okay, I do have this opportunity to take a pause and to think about my response. Like with the great questions that you've had today, I've had a chance to think about it in advance and on the fly. you know, wouldn't it be great if we all had that opportunity all the time? Truly, you know?

Seth Fleischauer (42:13.456)
We'll hope. Thank you so much for coming here today. Allison Tammy. Do you guys have any last thoughts or questions for hope?

Allyson (42:21.307)
I am just so excited to continue to learn from you. I can't wait to continue the conversation. And I just thank you for all of the great work you're doing because it shows, you know, the stories you're telling, the testimonials you shared, it really shows the impact of how these projects can motivate individuals to be global citizens that are thoughtful and meaningful in how they're approaching their projects and hopefully the world after.

Hope Windle (42:46.911)
Yeah.

Tami Moehring (42:46.93)
Yes, thank you so much. I just have to say, I love that each of the projects seem like they're too random. Not necessarily random, but they're two things that you won't put together and you put them together and it works. I think it's just life. know, you're sometimes paired with unique things and you can find, you know, a solution to the project. And that's the best part. And it's not just.

you know, four-year college students and four-year college students, know, all together. And that's the best part. I mean, everyone can learn from everyone.

Hope Windle (43:20.937)
Yeah, absolutely.

Seth Fleischauer (43:22.752)
the last thing, last question I hope would be to, can we find, information about your work?

Hope Windle (43:30.421)
sure, Coil, so C-O-I-L dot SUNY dot E-D-U. I would go there, but you could also Google Coil Virtual Exchange. It's not only happening at SUNY, it's happening all over the world. It's a huge movement, which is so great. Latin America is embracing it fully. All over the Pacific Rim is really embracing it. It's now

coming to India in a giant wave and Sub-Saharan Africa, Durban University of Technology is leading the way in South Africa and the MENA region is exploding with the greatness of COIL as well as all over Europe. so what's really nice is that it's not just me, it's this huge collection and

collaboration of so many people who care deeply that we all want our students to be able to talk to each other.

Allyson (44:35.019)
Yay! Join the movement! Yes!

Seth Fleischauer (44:35.258)
It's not just, yeah. Yeah. It's not just, it's not just a project. It's a program, not just a program. It's, it's a movement. It's a way of being. love it. well, thank you so much again for being here for our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us, leave a review, leave us a rating, tell a friend. it helps more educators, leaders, and curious thinkers discover these stories.

Hope Windle (44:37.864)
Yes, absolutely.

It is. It is.

Seth Fleischauer (45:00.282)
This episode was written and produced by myself, Tammy and Alison and edited by Lucas Salazar. You can find more resources, episodes and insights at c i l c dot org slash podcast and learn about my work, supporting live virtual learning experiences at banding global learning.com. And we will leave any links to, that was, that were mentioned by hope today or on the episode in the show notes as well. Otherwise.

Allyson (45:06.523)
Thank you.

Seth Fleischauer (45:27.002)
Thank you for listening and until next time we will keep exploring what's possible when learning goes beyond the classroom.

Hope Windle (45:38.752)
Okay.