Against all odds : Problem-solving as a skill critical to virtual exchange
Virtual Exchange (VE) brings together groups of learners from different geographical locations and cultural backgrounds to engage them in online intercultural collaboration and interaction. Although VE projects are designed and implemented by educators as part of the students’ educational programmes, they often go beyond the setting of traditional courses offered by higher education institutions. Because of their innovative nature, VEs require the students to leave their comfort zone and think outside the box to develop new creative strategies of communication and collaboration in order to find solutions to problems that crop up in this new learning environment. This presentation showcases …
Under the magnifying glass: critical moments in virtual exchange
Virtual Exchange (VE) is a form of experiential learning that relies heavily on learning-by-doing and reflection. The present study draws on visual data comprising students’ perceptions of critical learning incidents presented under an imaginary magnifying glass. To complete this project-closing reflective activity, the students had to describe a critical moment that they had experienced during VE and present it in a visual form. Data was collected longitudinally, in three projects (2019, 2020, and 2021) that followed the same pedagogical design and focused on the theme of tourism. The collaborating universities were from three countries: Poland, Finland, and the Netherlands. We used the me…
Combining expertise from linguistics and tourism: a tale of two cities
This case study presents the results of an interdisciplinary Virtual Exchange (VE) that was arranged between Finnish and Polish students in 2019. During their six-week collaboration, the students of language studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, worked in teams together with their Polish peers specialising in information and communications technology and management in tourism at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. The international teams combined their linguistic and tourism-promotion expertise, and, using collaborative digital tools, grappled with the tasks of analysing the official municipal city websites and promoting the lesser-known aspects of their sister cities (…