Collaborative online international learning (COIL) virtual exchange (VE) programs have been proven to bring a great number of benefits to the preparation of students as global citizens and professionals (Gleason & Jaramillo Cherrez, 2021). Specifically, COIL VE is a proven method for providing underrepresented college students with global learning opportunities that advance social and economic mobility (Appiah-Kubi & Annan, 2020) by building global knowledge and skills for the 21st-century workplace (Standley, 2015). There are several components which aid in making a COIL experience successful. Faculty preparation and course engagement are obviously critical, but equally critical is the matching of students. Students need to be matched in a way that encourages interaction and conversation so the global learning can happen. Traditionally, students have been matched based on racial and cultural differences in the hopes that deep connections with students who are different from one another can be created. Although COIL is intended to engage students with diverse peers, it is how we define diversity that can lead us to the most successful types of matches. Diversity as a practice can comprise different backgrounds such as ethnic, cognitive, gender, and so on. Landorf et al. (2018) defined diversity “as the varied cognitive tools that members of different identity groups apply to complex knowledge exchange and production tasks” (p. 60). In this chapter, we will suggest an alternative way for matching students from how it has been done in the past. Here, we talk about the benefit of matching students who may be culturally similar but geographically different.
