Search results for "Virtual Exchange"
showing 10 items of 10 documents
Overcoming Essentialism? Students’ Reflections on Learning Intercultural Communication Online
2022
The fields of intercultural communication (IC) and intercultural education are in flux and the paradigmatic shift is away from essentialist approaches on culture and interculturality towards seeing IC and interculturality as flexible, fluid, contradictory, political, and ideological constructs. This study presents a virtual exchange project, a joint introductory course on IC between a Finnish university and a French university. One of the objectives of the course was to provide students with a more critical, non-essentialist perspective on interculturality. This study presents an analysis of 32 students’ texts (learning logs) that are processed qualitatively using content analysis to find a…
Against all odds : Problem-solving as a skill critical to virtual exchange
2021
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 …
Artefact co-construction in virtual exchange: 'Youth Entrepreneurship for Society'
2020
The aim of this research study around the co-construction and sharing of authentic and meaningful artefacts within the 'Youth Entrepreneurship for Society' virtual exchange was to find out how the implementation of artefact-based telecollaborative tasks fosters 21st competences and social entrepreneurship in English for Specific Purposes settings. The project tasks were informed by constructionism and supported virtual collaboration an effort to promote social justice. They revolved around social entrepreneurship in English for Specific Purposes contexts, aiming to connect the classroom with the outside world through the involvement of local organisations, while fostering students' twenty-f…
“I felt a bit nervous” : Virtual Exchange as an emotional journey
2021
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
2019
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
“Nice to get to know you” : Social presence in virtual exchange discourse
2020
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
2020
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…
Under the magnifying glass: critical moments in virtual exchange
2022
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…
Multimodal design for virtual exchange
2022
Combining expertise from linguistics and tourism: a tale of two cities
2020
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 (…