MEANINGFUL FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING THROUGH ONLINE COLLABORATION

Abstract

Professional higher education faces competing demands: evolving professional expectations, changing teaching practices, and the diverse preferences students bring to their learning. There is an increasing emphasis on shorter, practice-oriented learning formats and on transversal skills such as critical thinking, empathy, and active listening, while learning activities often provide limited opportunities for meaningful use of language. In Estonia, this tension is intensified by reduced curricular space for language instruction in many higher education institutions, creating a need for focused approaches that are meaningful to both learners and prospective employers. An analysis of the compulsory and elective curricula at two partner institutions confirms this gap directly: courses explicitly aimed at transversal skill development account for only 6–8% of subjects, with the remainder dominated by procedural, legal, and domain-specific training.To address this gap, we designed a collaborative online international learning (COIL) task (Rubin, 2000) joining law enforcement students from Estonia, Finland, and Slovakia, who work in cross-national pairs to initiate contact, negotiate communication, and collaborate on profession-related topics. The task design was informed by the need for microlearning-oriented formats, the growing importance of transversal (communication) skills (World Economic Forum, 2025), and the requirement that language learning be closely embedded in the professional domain and structured as a life-like situation in which students genuinely need to use a foreign language.This paper reports on four years of iterative design, implementation, and analysis of the task, refining a set of evidence-based guidelines for COIL task design in professional higher education. Drawing on structured feedback from 83 students across the three institutions, we find that the task supports the development of both content and language knowledge and, in particular, transversal skills: the largest perceived gains were in critical thinking, problem solving, and adaptability — precisely the skills our curriculum analysis shows are otherwise under-taught and that employers and the wider literature identify as most needed. We conclude with practical recommendations for embedding similarly authentic, low-cost collaborative tasks within existing mandatory courses.