Drifts of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) towards pedagogical innovation: a foretelling bibliometric analysis

Abstract

In the current global world, and also due to the CoVID-19 pandemic and the evolving digital technologies, education is changing faster and more dramatically now than at any time in history. In this context, education is drifting away from the traditional approaches and into the integration of international, intercultural and global dimensions in higher education, vocational education and training, as well as in secondary education. Thus, the purpose of this exploratory study is to unveil current trends and future needs of research and practice focused on Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), to set conceptual foundations for further pedagogical innovation. Following the PRISMA 2020 statement, the corpus of the study integrates a final set of research studies (n = 135), published between 2019–2022. Considering the main key-terms of recent literature in the area, the collected data were analyzed by means of a bibliometric analysis, using VOSviewer’s network and overlay visualization of most frequent terms.