Sue met her future COIL partners at a conference in 2023, where a casual conversation about shared interests eventually led to a COIL project in 2025.
Sue and her partners from Bournemouth University (UK) and Hochschule Niederrhein (Germany) identified a common interest in designing textile-based functional products that address protective needs, which led to their co-authoring a paper that supported the project’s scoping and conceptual framing.
A colleague from Bournemouth suggested engaging with a long-term partner, Emedo (https://emedo.or.tz/), a Tanzania-based non-profit organization that works closely with fishing communities to develop safe and affordable buoyancy solutions.
Together, they identified the COIL project, Buoyant Threads, which launched in October 2025 and ran for six weeks.
A distinctive feature was the diversity of participating students across disciplines and academic levels. KPU second-year Product Design students collaborated with graduate engineers (UK) and master’s-level textile students (Germany).
While initially uncertain about how this would unfold, given the time zone differences and academic schedules, Sue’s students’ feedback was overwhelmingly positive. They cited the COIL course as the highlight of their term!
Personally, I found my students’ approach to learning shifted when collaborating across cultures, languages, and time zones- they showed empathy and deeper learning beyond the classroom. I look forward to referring to the project in future courses.
Sue Fairburn — Faculty, Wilson School of Design
Read more about COIL through the KPU website: Collaborative Online International Learning at KPU
