50 SDG 16 Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions – COIL Instructors

This COIL activity promotes SDG 16.  All of the reflections shown below are the instructor reflections on the COIL activity.

Individual Reflections

Romina Hosseingholizadeh – Coach, University of Guelph, Canada.

Over the course of six remarkable weeks, I had the privilege of co-coaching an activity centered around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). During this transformative experience, more than 400 students from six different countries came together to explore the intersection of SDGs and companies with innovative solutions. The most impactful aspect of this activity was witnessing the power of collaboration among students from diverse backgrounds, which directly aligns with the spirit of SDG 16.

By bringing together young minds from different countries and cultures, a vibrant and dynamic environment where ideas freely flowed was created. The collective efforts and diversity of the participating students enriched the discussions and fostered a deeper understanding of the SDGs and their practical applications in the business world, including the importance of building inclusive institutions and promoting access to justice.

The cross-cultural interactions among the students were a constant source of inspiration throughout the activity. Each student brought a unique set of experiences and perspectives shaped by their cultural heritage, educational backgrounds, and personal journeys. This diversity allowed for a rich exchange of ideas and challenged everyone involved to think beyond their own cultural frameworks, promoting inclusivity and understanding. Witnessing the synergy that emerged from this global collaboration was truly remarkable and reinforced the principles of SDG 16. It highlighted the importance of inclusive decision-making processes, the need for accountable institutions, and the value of peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development.

Reflecting on this experience, I am filled with gratitude and inspiration. It reaffirmed my belief in the potential of young people to shape a better future and emphasized the importance of fostering global connections and collaboration to achieve SDG 16’s objectives. Moving forward, it is imperative to empower and support youth in their pursuit of sustainable solutions, as they hold the key to creating inclusive and prosperous societies that prioritize justice and accountability.

Ruben Burga – Coach, University of Guelph, Canada.

As one of the coaches for this COIL F23 experience, I was privileged to read every weekly reflection from each team during the COIL activity. I was impressed by the passion that many teams exhibited towards their AIM2Flourish clients and how thoughtful they were about the intersection of sustainability (using the UN SDGs to anchor their thinking) and the business innovations. All of this work was done within the challenges of working in a virtual global environment where students had to adjust their schedules to meet at times that would work for most members of their team.

As a faculty and instructor in a Department of Management, I was pleased that the students used their knowledge of management and previous academic knowledge to enhance their own learnings. This COIL activity complements SDG 16 through the promotion of peace – enhancing mutual understanding and communication; and strong institutions – by reinforcing our collaboration among higher education institutions in Canada, the USA, Spain, Indonesia, South Africa, and Kenya.

Isabel Rodriguez-Tejedo – Instructor, Universidad de Navarra, Spain.

As I sit down to write this reflection, I am awed by what our students have accomplished in such a short period of time. I can only imagine being 19-20 and hearing that you´ll be working hand by hand with students from other five universities from around the world to discover experiences of businesses for global good. I suspect it was a mixture of surprise and a little bit of fear. Graded teamwork can be challenging, add people from three continents to the mix and it´s probably quite a tall order!

This Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) activity facilitated an experience of experiential learning revolved around a unique combination of student exploration and collaborative learning. It aimed to foster a holistic understanding of the purpose of businesses and to encourage students to reflect upon their potential to drive positive change on a global scale.

The AIM2Flourish competition offers students an extraordinary opportunity to engage with businesspeople and explore how businesses can contribute to the UN SDGs. This experiential approach allows students to see how theoretical concepts are translated into real-world businesses and encourages students to envision themselves as future leaders committed to making a positive impact.

Doing it with international teammates multiplies its benefits, supplying them with career-relevant skills. It provides them with a global perspective and fosters cross-cultural awareness, an essential skill in our globalized world. Students also engage in collaborative learning in a digital environment, an experience that mirrors the teamwork required in today’s global business environment.

Looking back, I believe the COIL framework, paired with the AIM2Flourish assignment, holds great potential to be a transformative exercise for business students. It holds significant challenges, such as coordinating across time-zones and getting comfortable with different working ethics, but also creates great opportunities. Beyond the global perspective and interdisciplinary skills it helps develop, it can prepare our students to be future leaders who understand the power of business to drive positive change and contribute meaningfully to a sustainable and inclusive global economy.

Yang Hoong – Instructor, University of Guelph, Canada.

As an instructor reflecting on the COIL experience, I am filled with immense pride and satisfaction witnessing the remarkable growth of our students. They not only survived but thrived in an environment far removed from their comfort zones. Undertaking tasks like appreciative interviews and engaging with diverse participants showcased their adaptability and ingenuity. The resilience and methodological approach they displayed in overcoming challenges across cultures (e.g., timezones, communication barriers) were nothing short of inspirational. Their ability to respectfully navigate these complexities speaks volumes about their potential.

This book, therefore, is more than a collection of student works; it’s a beacon of inspiration. It’s a call to fellow educators to be bold, to step outside the traditional classroom boundaries. Our students possess extraordinary talent and capability, and they flourish when given the opportunity to apply their learning in real-world contexts. It is my sincere hope that this book encourages future instructors to explore innovative, experiential learning methodologies, unlocking the vast potential within each student. This is not just about teaching; it’s about empowering the next generation of global citizens and leaders.

Ferdinand Niyimbanira – Instructor, University of Mpumalanga

The time I am writing this short piece on SDG 16: peace, Justice and strong institutions there are turbulences all over the world. With coups in West Africa, the continued conflict in the DRC resulting in millions of people being displaced and hundreds if not thousands being killed in what some analysts call a silence genocide, the recent conflict in Ethiopia between its government and Tigrey forces, the war in the North of Mozambique, election fraud in countries like Zimbabwe; and some dictatorships in different African countries; one may think that we are nowhere near establishing strong democratic institutions or bring about peace in the continent but there is hope. A hope that requires only one thing; i.e strengthening the role of African Union towards maintaining peace and enforcing the high regard of law and democracy.
Beyond the African continent, there is unending war between Ukraine and Russia, the ongoing Palestine and Israel war, the border conflict between China and India; and many more. These may tempt one to think that the SDG 16 remains an illusion, given the instability in terms of peace and security, starvation, pandemics and socio-economic challenges coupled with politics around the world. However, we remain hopeful that the leaders of the countries in conflict will come to their senses and remember that there is a global agenda to achieve peace and will reach a permanent cease fire and seat around a table to bring peaceful solutions to all the conflicts.

There is a hope that peace and justice will be achieved, though we remain with only six years to target year of 2030. A lot can be done in six years, it is just a matter of political will. Those in power should have the zeal and ambition to achieve SDG 16 then it’s easy for citizenry to rally behind that goal. This can be done if there is a mechanism to track the successes at local level. In other words, the realization to the implementation of any SDG should be at the local level, local authorities must be given custodianship of bringing grassroot solutions. Thus, there must be a road map, and linkage in term of outcomes from the national to the lower level of planning. The road map should specifically show the role each stakeholder must play, including citizens in their individual capacity and companies or corporate at local level. Here, I argue that as much as SDGs are the global agenda but for any development vision to be realized, there is a vehement need to include at the center the local government, in terms of their plans and incarnate and amalgamate with the bigger and broader vision.

I cannot finish without indicating how COIL contributes to the sustainable development goals by tasking young people (university students) to find businesses and interview them on how they are implementing SDGs. Surprisingly some of the businesses are not specifically aware of the SDGs. That’s where COIL comes in, teaching the businesses about global goals and enabling them to realize that they are addressing those goals, but they don’t know it yet. Many businesses contribute to the SDG 16 by working with different civil societies through their corporate social responsibilities. If encouraged many companies will and may redirect funds and corporate social initiatives toward SDG 16. More specifically, a peaceful world is a good environment for Business. The business owners understand very well importance of peace for their operations. Hence, an awareness campaign encouraging Businesses to invest more toward achieving peace globally will always be welcomed. Doing this campaign through COIL would be easy way. Let me end this piece by saying viva COIL, viva!

Amelia Naim Indrajaya – Instructor, IPMI International Business School, Indonesia

It has been a great experience being a part of the faculty team in the COIL program. I have been joining the COIL program since the beginning. It is very interesting how we experiment with different approaches, and see how students react sometimes differently toward the different approaches. The first COIL was conducted during the Winter semester 2022. We had a structured meeting with a set of questions to be discussed by students coming from three different continents University of Navarra, Spain; University of Guelph, Canada and IPMI International Business School, Indonesia. They had to read a list of case studies from www.aim2flourish for a specific SDG goal. At the end everyone contributed to write a critical reflection. The selected critical reflections were published with an international ISBN. The students were thrilled to have the experience of discussing with friends from different continents. How happy they were, could be seen through the word cloud we had in the last final zoom sessions with all the students from three continents participating (insert word cloud from first COIL).

The second COIL was conducted Fall 2022. This time we had another campus participating from Dominican University, Chicago, Illinois, USA. In the third COIL students must develop a story of a flourishing business supporting at least one of the SDGs to be published in www.aim2flourish.com. They also have to create a poster to showcase their interview results with the business owners or key persons. We had both physical exhibitions of the posters and virtual exhibitions. The spatial.ai metaverse serves as a great solution to our virtual exhibitions need. Everyone around the world can come and visit our exhibition room through spatial.ai. The students also have to write a critical reflections based on their group experiences going through the COIL program.

The third COIL started in Fall 2023. This time we had two more campuses joining, adding to the colorful cultural diversities of the COIL group. Mpumalanga university South Africa and Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya, both were joining the COIL activities. We had more than 400 students from six campuses. This time the group is kept like before, maximum of six with three campuses each represented by two students. The meeting is still scheduled to have two big zoom meetings with everyone in the beginning and at the end of the COIL activity, while in between, each group should meet at least once in a week. The group has three deliverables, the aim2flourish submission, the poster, and the critical reflections. All the weekly meetings were requested to complete the challenge. Interesting comments were collected from the students. Some students preferred the guided discussion as seen in the first COIL, where everyone had to discuss weekly topics. Some other students felt they need to focus to the stories for Aim2flourish submission, the poster and the final critical reflections, and should not spent extra time discussing guided themes for weekly meeting. We are very blessed that Ruben Burga and team supporting the COIL came up with an excellent idea to offer two different versions of COIL in the future. One COIL will be more into the first COIL style, discussion of guided themes based on the set of case studies from www.aim2flourish.com and a critical reflection book chapter, and the other COIL will be with the interview for a new story in aim2flourish, and the poster and the critical reflection. Indonesia’s students are more interested in the discussion and building the relationship between students from different campuses around the world, so they prefer the first alternative, where students can have more open discussions and they can explore many different aspects from the guided discussion themes provided by the COIL faculty team.

In general, all the students were happy with the experience. For the Indonesian students, the culture is emphasizing more importance of the relationship orientation compared to the task orientation, so students are hoping that the future COIL will offer more humanistic guided discussions to develop cross-cultural relationship. With the breakthrough technology innovation such as the Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and the Metaverse, we might be able to have an explorative journey together using the technology, where the members could physically be in different continent but virtually explore the world together enabled by Virtual Reality for example. IPMI had tried the Virtual Reality session before in the previous class, and it was fun. Students were able to visit different places in the world through virtual reality and had shared discussion with their team members after the experience. The sky is not even the limit for future breakthrough technology enabled, cross-cultural classroom collaboration. We are very happy to be part of this COIL initiative, and we are looking forward to being part of the future COIL experience.

Mary Ragui – Instructor, Kenyatta University

When I had my first meeting with Prof. Ruben Burga on the Collaboration Online International Learning (COIL) project, I was quite excited and could not wait to see how it would unfold. Compilation of the teams which were to include students from four different continents and six universities increased my anxiety as I looked at time differences between them. Additionally, I was eager to see the outputs inform of posters and publication of case studies on the UN AIM2Flourish platform.

Partnership between students to achieve a common goal (COIL2023 Project) helped to realize United Nations global Sustainable Development Goal number seventeen (SDG 17) even before the project began. Faculty members collaboration, sharing knowledge and resources was also considered as fulfillment of SDG 17.

In 2017, Kenya’s education curriculum changed from 8-4-4 Curriculum which had been in existence since 1985 to Competency Based Curriculum (CBC). 8-4-4 was coined from how it was applied – 8 years in primary school, 4 years in secondary school and 4 years in university, It was more teacher-centred with minimum learner engagement making it more theoretical than practical. The new curriculum from 2017, CBC, see learners take a total of 17 years in the education system – 2 years in pre-primary school, 3 years in lower primary school, 3 years in upper primary school, 3 years on lower secondary school, 3 years in senior secondary school and 3 years college education. The curriculum is more learner-centred and its aim is to have more engaged, empowered and ethical citizens.

Integrating teaching of UN SDGs into business topics has previously involved lecturing without much involvement of students. This is theoretical and it denied students an opportunity to realise how businesses sector contribute to the SDG. Research on businesses innovations and contribution to SDG has also remained undocumented therefore best practices for more business leaders to learn from is not available.

Students in Kenya universities are still products of 8-4-4 system and therefore the COIL project pedagogy was a new concept to them. Engagement with the industry in their level helped them to appreciate SDG and learn more application of the same in businesses. Research using appreciative method of inquiry required lots of soft skills which they have gained from the same. These range from planning, organizing, communication and collaboration, critical thinking, digital literacy, time management, handling global teams with different cultures, creativity and imagination and more importantly self-efficacy.

As a faculty member, COIL project enabled me to connect with others and gained more from sharing and learning how to handle learners in global set-up. Keeping them engaged using the new pedagogy was a challenge in the beginning as most were not prepared for the same owing to the education curriculum. Others did not own compatible gadgets (laptops or smart-phones) to use at odd hours as they normally use those provided in university libraries for their school work. This was a challenge to them since their team meetings were taking place outside working hours because of time difference. This led to some of the learners dropping from the project and therefore not starting/finishing the project with the team. However, those who engaged were committed and actively participated in the project.

I applaud the faculty members from the six universities for making this happen even in different time zones. This shows dedication towards our role as mentors to the next generations. Facilitation of the project was seamless and within the time limit. The output of colourful posters and case studies with best practices documentation was mind-blowing.

Finally, coaches – Ruben and Romina did an awesome job and if I were looking for great workers, I would not hesitate to hire them – University of Guelph should be proud of the two. I look forward to working on future projects with them and the team.

To conclude, COIL project has increased my appetite on case studies writing using appreciative method of enquiry which will help increase case studies for learners-engagement. I will also share the knowledge with my colleagues in the university and disseminate the outputs of the project.

Anjali Chaudhry – Instructor, Dominican University, USA

As the need for understanding and incorporating sustainability in our teaching become more and more urgent, we, the educators have been challenged in many ways. Let us consider the definition as a first step. Sustainability, defined as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” by the United Nations Brundtland Commission (1987) highlights the abstract nature of the concept. Second, businesses as foes of sustainability have been such a common trope that until recently Google used “Don’t Be Evil,” as its official motto. So, highlighting how business can be engines for sustainability is a challenge indeed. Finally, there is the question of how to make students aware that sustainability is fundamentally a global issue and therefore, calls for collaboration across national boundaries. Considering these challenges, it is truly remarkable to me that COIL as an experiential tool is a perfect foil to counter all these issues. In its basic form, COIL introduces the concept of sustainability in a practical rather than pedantic way, helping focus on the solutions rather than problems around sustainability. But it does so much more. As I reflect on the unique value COIL brings to my students’ learning, it is about understanding how businesses engage in innovations related to sustainability across national borders, it about learning effective communication skills whether for interviewing business leaders using appreciative inquiry approach, or engaging in cross-cultural communication with team-members, and most importantly, learning to work in virtual settings across different time-zones and diverse milieu.

I would also like to offer a reality check about the magnitude of work involved in running a COIL. The core faculty had been meeting for months prior to the launch of the assignment to create and revise the instructional document so it is to the point and yet full of pertinent details, it is thorough and yet, not too dense. Once the 6-week activity was launched, ironically, we the faculty had a parallel experience with the students who were part of this activity. Just as each week, student teams met virtually to work on identifying and then interviewing local businesses regarding their innovative practices towards sustainability, we faculty members had our own weekly meetings ensuring that we have created appropriate scaffolding that would enable students to undertake the weekly activities. Once the submissions were in, despite the incredible support provided by the University of Guelph coaches, considerable work remained as COIL teams dealt with their own unique challenges from non-communicating team members, finding mutually convenient times to meet, identifying businesses to interview, dealing with non-responsive business who initially committed, and many more on those lines.

And, yet this is such a worthwhile experience elevating my students’ learning in a way that could not be achieved in any other way. Personally, too it has been transformative experience getting to be part of this wonderful community-of-practice we created in the COIL with faculty from six higher education institutions, including, Canada, Indonesia, Kenya, Spain, and South Africa. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to be part of this experience and I look forward to continued collaboration with this academic family.