Chiranjeewa Atapattu
Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
Chiranjeewa Atapattu (CJ) is a Senior Lecturer and Faculty COIL Lead at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Business and Law. He leads one of the most active virtual exchange programmes in the UK, overseeing more than 15 collaborative online international learning projects with over 400 students engaged across partner institutions spanning Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, North America, Africa, and Latin America. Alongside his COIL leadership, Chiranjeewa coaches students for global business competitions, consistently securing top placements and podium finishes at prestigious international events. His work sits at the intersection of internationalisation, work-integrated learning, and pedagogical innovation. Committed to equitable and inclusive international education, he brings both scholarly rigour and practitioner expertise to his role, making Manchester Met’s virtual exchange programme a nationally recognised model of internationalisation at home delivered at scale.
“COIL genuinely surprises me every time. You put students from completely different parts of the world together, give them a real problem, and something unexpected always happens. They figure each other out, they challenge each other, and they produce work none of them could have done alone. Yes, there are time zones and tech headaches. But the moment a student says I never thought about it that way before , that is why we do this.”
Project Information
Project Name: Develop a 360 video virtual reality (VR) experience on intercultural encounters
Partner: Praneschen (Che) Govender, Hotelschool The Hague (Netherlands)
Project Length: 12 weeks
Modality: Synchronous & Asynchronous
Technology Tools Utilized: Padlet, Miro, WarpVR, Teams
UN Sustainable Development Goals: Quality Education; Gender Equality; Reduced Inequalities; Partnerships for the Goals
Project Summary:
Manchester Met and Hotelschool The Hague partnered on a COIL project centred on intercultural leadership development. Students from both institutions worked in mixed international teams to co-create a 360-degree virtual reality experience exploring intercultural guest interactions in hospitality settings. Rather than focusing solely on the final output, the project foregrounded the collaborative process itself : how students from different cultural backgrounds communicated, negotiated, and built something together across borders. Teams used Miro and Padlet as shared digital workspaces for collaborative planning, ideation, and team coordination across time zones. The immersive content was captured using 360-degree cameras and brought to life through specialist VR editing software, giving students hands-on experience of emerging technology alongside the intercultural learning at the heart of the project. The experience gave participants a unique opportunity to develop intercultural competence in action, preparing them not just to understand cultural difference in theory but to navigate it in practice.
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will demonstrate intercultural communicative competence by collaborating effectively within diverse international teams, navigating cultural difference as a productive resource rather than a barrier in the co-creation of a shared digital artifact.
- Students will apply emerging immersive technologies, including 360-degree video capture and VR editing tools, to design and produce an experiential learning resource that reflects critically on intercultural guest interactions within professional hospitality contexts.