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Reflecting on their experience piloting Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) as a staff development tool for Ukraine’s higher education sector, Tamara Kavytska and Viktoriia Drobotun outline what they have learned and how it can be useful for other universities responding to a major crisis.
When Russia's full-scale invasion cut Ukrainian academics off from international conferences, exchanges and collaborations almost overnight, universities faced a tough choice. Would we retreat into isolation, or find new ways to stay connected to the global academic community?
Our experience piloting Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) as a staff development tool suggests that even under fire, connection is not a luxury. It may be exactly what our profession needs most in a crisis.
Before 2022, Ukraine's system for continuing professional development (CPD) was tightly centralised. State-run institutions provided training, and university faculty were required to complete 180 hours over five years through specified programmes. It was a system built for stability, and it worked reasonably well while conditions were stable.
Then stability ended. The old model could not adapt quickly enough to a country at war, and Ukraine began reforming its CPD system into something more flexible. So, the new model changed to 120 hours over five years, with educators now choosing their own training providers: universities, NGOs, or online platforms. Priorities shifted accordingly, towards overcoming learning losses, providing psychosocial support and building digital competence.
This reform is unfolding against a devastating backdrop. Over 4,000 educational institutions have been damaged or destroyed, including 229 schools and 97 universities. More than six million students face barriers to education, and roughly 26,000 teachers, at school and university level combined, are simply gone.
These numbers describe colleagues teaching from bomb shelters and libraries reduced to rubble. Many understandably questioned whether professional development requirements made sense while people were struggling to survive. We would argue the opposite: precisely because of this devastation, professional development became more critical, not less. The question was never whether to continue it, but how.
To start with, we identified five interconnected challenges reshaping Ukrainian academic life:
and, cutting across all of these,
It was this fifth challenge, isolation, that pointed us most directly towards COIL.
COIL, or Collaborative Online International Learning, connects classrooms and educators across countries in shared, technology-mediated learning environments. It sits within a broader family of practices, including Online Intercultural Exchange, Telecollaboration and Globally Networked Learning. All of these practices share a common core: they use digital tools to connect participants across cultures and emphasise genuine collaboration over passive exposure.
We grounded our approach in Laura Desimone from the University of Pennsylvania's core conceptual framework for effective professional development. This framework identifies five features of what works: content focus, active learning, coherence with institutional goals, sustained duration and collective participation.
COIL-based staff development embodies all five almost by design. It focuses on digital pedagogy and intercultural communication, demands active learning through real international collaboration, aligns with internationalisation goals, unfolds over months rather than a single workshop and requires educators to work in international teams.
Globally, COIL is maturing; institutions in the United States and across Europe are moving from classroom-level innovation towards regional and national policy support. In Ukraine, by contrast, COIL has until recently remained largely unknown and been sustained mainly through the initiative of individual educators rather than institutional structures. That gap is itself part of the story.
Isolated institutions could not close that gap alone, so in 2023, six universities, four state and two private, founded the Alliance of Ukrainian Universities to coordinate a response to the challenges facing higher education after the full-scale invasion.
Through the Alliance, COIL Staff Development Programmes were developed to help educators adapt to new realities while sustaining international collaboration despite the ongoing crisis. Two cohorts have run so far. ‘Global Synergy through COIL’, held in Lviv in early 2024, introduced 34 participants to core COIL principles, digital tools and partner search, helping them sketch their first pilot projects. ‘Global Synergy through COIL 2.0’, held in Kyiv in spring 2025, moved 30 participants further towards embedding COIL into regular courses and ensured its long-term viability.
Participants' challenges were predictable but instructive: limited familiarity with COIL pedagogy, low confidence with digital tools, difficulty sustaining motivation, uneven internet access and a simple lack of time and institutional backing.
In response, five strategies proved most effective:
None of this eliminated the underlying difficulties. The war continues, and resources remain scarce. But even under the most difficult circumstances, educators can still build international connections and develop new competencies.
COIL addresses several crisis needs at once. It requires minimal infrastructure and costs relatively little. It directly counters isolation by rebuilding international networks.
Moreover, it offers meaningful, engaging work at a moment when motivation cannot be taken for granted. And it develops precisely the digital and intercultural competencies that Ukraine's reformed, more flexible CPD system now prioritises.
For universities elsewhere considering how to support staff through disruption, whatever its cause, the Ukrainian experience suggests that global collaboration is not a distraction from crisis response. It can be a key part of it.
Note: This article is based on a presentation on ‘Global Collaboration: Lessons from COIL-Based Staff Development in Ukrainian Universities’ given by the authors at the 2026 European Learning & Teaching Forum in Lisbon, Portugal.
