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 …
“I felt a bit nervous” : Virtual Exchange as an emotional journey
Virtual Exchange is a collective term for a set of collaborative online learning practices that cut across institutional, cultural, and international borders. Moving outside their learning environments, the participants engage in project work with foreign peers. The teams have to work across time zones, use foreign languages, manage cultural differences and apply digital tools for communication and collaboration. The virtual projects enhance the development of transversal work/life skills, which are an asset in today’s global labour market. The aim of the present study is to explore the emotional trajectory of Virtual Exchange based on the students’ e-portfolios. By analysing the self-evalu…
Crossing borders without travel : virtual exchange practices for students
Virtual Exchange (VE) offers unique educational experiences at the intersection of the digital, the social, and the intercultural. It re-situates learning by creating an inclusive transnational learning space, where the participants move across and beyond cultural, curricular and individual boundaries. nonPeerReviewed
Videoconferencing in ESP Classes : Learner-Centred Approach
The integration of videoconferencing (VC) into ESP education provides an opportunity for the combination of collaborative learning, autonomous learning and cross-cultural communication via social media and ICT implementation. Videoconferencing encourages students to take responsibility for their own learning in order to achieve a successful outcome of the whole session and enables them to apply varied project-based concepts. Instructors usually remain in the background during the lesson but take an active role in the preparation. The focus is on student– student interaction both in the VC classroom and in social media activities. The authors describe their first-hand experience as teachers …
“Nice to get to know you”
Virtual exchange comprises online collaborative activities in facilitated, educational contexts across borders. This paper offers a multimodal approach to the study of social presence in students’ asynchronous online discourse in the context of virtual exchange. It draws on the Community of Inquiry model of online learning (Garrison 2017) and interprets social presence as the dynamic discursive process of social interaction and self-presentation. The data consists of screenshots collected in a closed Facebook group during the first assignment of a Czech-Finnish virtual exchange project in 2017. The study aims to explore how the method of multimodal discourse analysis can be used to describe…
“Nice to get to know you” : Social presence in virtual exchange discourse
Virtual exchange comprises online collaborative activities in facilitated, educational contexts across borders. This paper offers a multimodal approach to the study of social presence in students’ asynchronous online discourse in the context of virtual exchange. It draws on the Community of Inquiry model of online learning (Garrison 2017) and interprets social presence as the dynamic discursive process of social interaction and self-presentation. The data consists of screenshots collected in a closed Facebook group during the first assignment of a Czech-Finnish virtual exchange project in 2017. The study aims to explore how the method of multimodal discourse analysis can be used to describe…
Virtual Exchange: Future-ready teaching of multiliteracies across borders and cultures
Virtual exchange is an online form of internationalization at home. Students from different countries collaborate in small, international groups on tasks joined by a common theme. They combine their expertise when solving problems together. The teachers act as mentors, providing facilitation and support for the students during the virtual exchange. The student teams work independently by selecting the tools for the collaboration, allocating the tasks and creating the group’s final product. Virtual exchange is a transnational learning opportunity which enables students to learn and practice how to efficiently combine and make use of their digital, visual, critical, linguistic and intercultur…
“Enymärä”: Thoughts on the use of Finnish as the majority language in locally published EFL activity books
It has been a long tradition in Finland to use locally published textbooks in primary foreign language education. The books have been designed for linguistically homogenous groups of students, which explains why Finnish, as the learners’ L1, is the instructive metalanguage chosen for the EFL activity books. However, the growing number of immigrant children in the Finnish educational system raises the question to what extent these activity books can serve the needs of linguistically more diverse groups of learners. The connection between the two languages is so strong that Finnish seems to serve as a precondition for the acquisition of English. The high proportion of tasks requiring fluency …
Development Speeded up by Necessity : The Future of Higher Education and Academic Work Online
The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on our lives and living. In higher education, it led to a swift shift from on-campus to online education resulting in practices of emergency remote teaching through virtual classrooms. In this project, we seek to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities that this abrupt, enforced change to online education entailed for faculty and students in Sweden and Finland. We aim to examine the evolution of online work and study practices, their impact on the teaching and learning environment, and new expectations imposed on the faculty and students. Our goal is to enhance the theoretical understanding of e-learning, developing guideli…
Language options and the role of English on Finnish banks' websites
The websites of commercial banks may serve multiple functions, including the provision of promotional, informational and online transactional services. The choice of languages offered on the websites reflects the banks' communication and marketing strategy in targeting groups of clients. In addition, the way content is presented on multilingual sites can shed light on the financial institution's implicit language policy. In order to understand the role of English in Finnish banks' online representation, a linguistic landscape approach was applied and the multilingual pages of 10 commercial banks were analyzed. The first aim was to find out how design, content, structure and usability relate…
University students’ (dis)engagement experiences in synchronous sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic
In the past two years, student engagement in online learning situations has become a mutual concern for educators all over the world. The impact of working in online environments and using video and other communication channels on students’ learning experiences is still not fully understood. The present study addresses this question by drawing on students’ written reflections and interviews from the Finnish higher education context collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. It uses the qualitative method of thematic analysis to investigate students’ experiences of interacting in synchronous sessions and their perceptions on (dis)engagement. The analysis shows the importance of versatile teachi…
Virtual exchange : not only for language learning
Technology enables teachers to connect their students online with foreign students in a facilitated educational setting. Such tele-collaborative intercultural projects are called virtual exchange practices (O’Dowd 2018). The students get an opportunity to engage in dialogues and tele-collaboration with peers from other countries. The intercultural encounters may not only enhance the participants’ intercultural and foreign language competencies but can also develop their collaborative skills. In addition, the students can learn how to manage in communicative situations, when the communicators’ language proficiency levels and study fields are different. This article provides an overview of vi…
An immigrant mother’s thoughts on the use of Finnish in English workbooks
I moved to Finland with my family three and a half years ago from Hungary. My older son (aged 11 then) spent a year in a Finnish preparatory class before he continued his studies in the 5th grade. He chose English as his A1 language because he had learnt it for three years in a Hungarian school. Despite his knowledge, the English home assignments proved to be very difficult for him to solve. The activity book relied greatly on the majority language: the instructions and many of the exercises required Finnish knowledge. We spent a lot of time using an electronic dictionary to do the English homework together. Finnish skills were needed even in the English language tests that he had to take, …
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…
Outsiders Reflecting on Invisible Institutional Gender Norms
In higher education (HE), especially in countries viewed as socially equal, often there are embedded normative institutional practices. This raises two intersecting issues: (1) how the perception of a Nordic social justice national ideology and policies may not translate into a reality for all and (2) how homogeneous non-colonial countries could contain invisible threads of gendered institutional coloniality which affect women and non-local/transnational women to a greater degree. Our study is unique as the research context is Finland, a Nordic socially equal country. The reality is that there is embedded inequity in institutionalized normative practices. The study employed a multi-perspect…