Abstract
Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) enables virtual mobility, giving students global exposure and global citizenship development without travel costs. As AI becomes embedded in these cross-border collaborations, it brings both promise and tension: lowering language barriers, bridging time zones, and scaffolding teamwork, while potentially diluting authentic intercultural experience and favoring better-resourced institutions.
This interactive panel brings together academics from diverse higher education institutions to examine whether AI democratizes international learning or deepens existing divides, drawing on perspectives from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia regions with distinct institutional, regulatory, and resource contexts.
Drawing on practitioner experience from Malaysia, Dubai, and India, and on COIL projects across Asian and global universities, the session surfaces real challenges, viz. equity gaps, divergent AI governance, and difficulty measuring intangible outcomes like global citizenship. It maps where AI genuinely lowers barriers (language access, administrative capacity, curriculum flexibility) versus where it quietly entrenches advantage (infrastructure, data literacy, vendor relationships).
Through facilitated discussion and small-group co-creation, participants will move beyond debate toward practical, principled strategies for equitable COIL design culminating in a shared position on responsible AI use and a proposed capability-equity framework for virtual mobility partnerships.
Learning objectives
- Distinguish between equity gaps and capability gaps in the context of virtual mobility, and articulate why conflating the two leads to flawed policy responses.
- Analyse specific AI applications including automated translation, adaptive learning, and AI-powered assessment through an equity lens, identifying contexts in which they expand access, contexts and consolidate advantage among better-resourced partners.
- Evaluate institution’s positioning within virtual mobility partnerships, recognising how AI adoption creates asymmetries in learning experience, administrative burden/programme quality.
- Apply a capability-equity framework to audit existing virtual mobility initiatives, enabling more intentional and equitable decisions about AI tool selection, partner onboarding, and shared governance.
- Develop at least one concrete institutional or partnership-level action to address an identified equity or capability gap in their AI-enabled virtual mobility practice.
Target audience
International office leaders, SIOs, policymakers responsible for designing/scaling virtual mobility programs, faculty, managers, learning technologists, and quality assurance staff involved in cross-border collaborative learning, practitioners, well-resourced institutions seeking to build equitable AI-enabled partnerships.