By Rick Vacek | April 16, 2025
Employers can’t stress it enough: Managing chaos has become a fundamental job skill.
But if they’re looking to hire a University of Texas at Dallas graduate and see Virtual Exchange/Collaborative Online International Learning (VE/COIL) on the resume, they’ll be happy to know that handling unexpected challenges is a key ingredient of the program’s recipe.
“It’s baked into a VE/COIL project because they have an international collaboration with people who usually are in a different time zone, which is frustrating but good because they have to figure out what to do when disruptions happen,” said Dr. Irina Panovska, Associate Professor of Economics at UT Dallas and a VE/COIL partner the last two fall semesters with the University of Marburg in Marburg, Germany.
“By definition, they’re working with somebody they have not met, and they have to clearly establish their roles.”
But first, they have to figure out what time it is. Many overseas students don’t understand how Daylight Savings Time works in the United States, and how many U.S. students know the time difference with any country outside North America?
It is not unusual for foreign students in a VE/COIL project to show up one hour late after most of America moves clocks one hour forward in March or one hour early when U.S. clocks “fall back” one hour in November.
The timely information is important because students are on the clock quickly in VE/COIL. After the first virtual session, scheduling the meetings is up to them, not their instructors.
“That was extremely helpful, building their confidence and their project-management skills,” Panovska said. “Many of them may have done it on a smaller scale in a class but not in an international setting across time zones. They hated the logistical challenges in the beginning; they loved it once it was done because they could see, ‘Oh, I actually did this.’”
But it’s not just educational training. It could be useful in a career.
Why does UT Dallas consider international education vital to the student experience? In the introductory session of a “Computer Vision without Borders” project with Anhembi Morumbi University in Sāo Paulo, Brazil, VE/COIL Coordinator Dr. Carol Cirulli Lanham shared a video that summed it up perfectly.
Trying to become a better, more informed global citizen, the video said, is like trying to swim without water. How can you profess to know what people are thinking on the other side of the world if you haven’t talked with them?
That’s why the first VE/COIL gathering, arranged by the instructors, is simply an icebreaker. Students are divided into chatrooms to “meet” each other, then return to the group meeting to tell their instructors some of the commonalities they discovered.
They also create personal profiles with one-minute videos that explain who they are and post a virtual bulletin board, Padlet, that displays their information, hobbies, videos and whatever else they’d like to share during the class, which runs four to eight weeks.
“This really helps form some friendships,” said Dr. Wade Halvorson, Theme Director of Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University in Australia, another VE/COIL collaborator with UT Dallas. “We had students who continued communications after the class was over.”
Sometimes, though, the first step is simply finding a way to communicate.
Jeff Price, Associate Professor of Game Design and Virtual Reality at UT Dallas, used Discord, a popular app in the gaming world, to connect his VE/COIL group with students at Mexico’s Universidad Anáhuac Puebla.
The app circumvented a spotty internet connection, translated when necessary and enabled the students to communicate asynchronously, overcoming the fact that the classes’ schedules overlapped for only a short time.
It took additional dexterity to solve another issue: Price had just nine graduate students who design games; the group in Mexico was undergraduates studying English and numbered 25. It was solved by creating three groups and having the UT Dallas students do most of the development while their counterparts did most of the research.
The happy ending was metaverse versions of three iconic Puebla sites – the Great Pyramid of Cholula (world’s largest pyramid by volume), Palafoxiana Library (oldest and most revered library in the Americas) and a vibrant street known as the Alley of the Frogs.
“There were a couple of little bumps,” Price said, “but I think it went very well. A lot of our students had never made a metaverse site before, and they had a great time talking with the students.”
Navigating a slippery learning curve is such an important facet of VE/COIL, instructors welcome the inevitable challenges.
“A little bit of chaos is good,” Dr. Ben Porter, Associate Professor of Instruction in Bioengineering, told the students after the initial “Computer Vision” session.
“I tell them it’s like international travel. Nothing is going to go as planned,” Cirulli Lanham said. “Sometimes students learn through the so-called failures.”
For example, Panovska’s students discovered that the European style of denoting decimals with a comma rather than a period – for example, 1,2 instead of 1.2 – can wreck a spreadsheet.
The numbers had to be precise because Panovska was having the students take an economic theory they learned in class and apply it to a data set for other countries, then use it to make projections.
The process might have felt like herding cats, but it could help them zero in on a job someday.
“Little things built their proficiency,” she said. “It was one at a time, and they had to do all the cat herding. It sounds goofy, but that is one of the skills listed as being in demand – resilience and the ability to deal with changes.”
An employer also would like to see that Price’s students completed an assignment that wasn’t just for an instructor’s eyes.
“Having the theory applied to real-life data makes it more interesting – seeing the theory in action and seeing how it actually matters. And there is a little bit of a peer effect because they work in a group.”
DR. IRINA PANOVSKA
“This was a good opportunity for students to do something that would be meaningful to real people in a real community,” he said.
By a VE/COIL project’s final session, in which students from both countries reflect on what they learned, it usually is easy to see what they’ve gained from the experience. But the benefits often don’t stop there.
One of Panovska’s former students leveraged the VE/COIL line on her resume into a promotion. “They were quite impressed that she was working with data in an international environment,” Panovska said. Another student used it to secure a job in the Federal Reserve.
But Panovska also has seen how it improves students’ performance in class.
“There are two effects,” she said. “Having the theory applied to real-life data makes it more interesting – seeing the theory in action and seeing how it actually matters. And there is a little bit of a peer effect because they work in a group. If they know who their teammates are and they have worked closely, they feel as if they need to step up.”
That’s why the VE/COIL faithful – both faculty and students – embrace the chaos.
“It definitely was worth the effort,” Price said. “I think our students got a lot out of it.”
For a simple reason, in Panovska’s view:
“After we found our feet, it was really fun.”
******
Related story: