Since October 2020, Simone is a part-time PhD researcher at Utrecht University. Her research interest is Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL).  COIL is a pedagogical approach, using digital technology, which has been used to help internationalise the curriculum and help students develop intercultural competencies at home rather than traveling abroad to acquire them. Simone is currently carrying out empirical research on the effectiveness of COIL under the supervision of Dr. Jeroen Janssen and Prof. dr. Jan van Tartwijk. 

Simone was born and raised in Ireland but moved to the Netherlands in 2006. She started working at the HU University of Applied Sciences in 2007 and in 2015 took up a position as Senior Lecturer and Advisor on internationalisation of the curriculum at The Hague University of Applied Sciences where she also teaches sociology and is a member of the research lectorate Global Learning. In her role, she has developed international educational programmes and courses, helped programmes embed internationalisation at home activities within the curriculum and has made numerous partnerships with universities world-wide for COIL and research projects as well as for student and staff exchanges. She has been developing and teaching COIL courses since 2013 and regularly presents at international education conferences.

Publications: 

Hackett, S., Janssen, J., Beach, P.  et al. (2023) The Effectiveness of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) on intercultural competence development in higher education. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. 20, 5 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-022-00373-3