Developing Global Citizenship through Interdisciplinary Conversations: Virtual Exchange on the UN SDGs

Sustainability is a driver of innovation yet the integration of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the innovation process is not yet the norm. In many cases, innovators are not even aware of the goals. To expose technology students and future innovators to the importance of SDGs as drivers of sustainable innovation, students from an American and German university worked together in teams on a sustainability and innovation virtual exchange project. Students chose a social impact area (field of technology)—energy, education, transportation, etc., analysed the current state and then identified the innovation that was required for a sustainable future in three different regions of the world twenty years from now. Students mapped the SDGs to their chosen social impact area, and then used this map as a framework for analysis, ideation and innovation. Working collaboratively, students investigated the political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal challenges to achieve a sustainable future in the three chosen regions. The virtual exchange project, lessons learned and results achieved will be presented so that other universities might consider engaging in similar initiatives.

The importance of global and intercultural competence across various fields has become increasingly evident. Since the COVID-19 health crisis, one approach that has gained acceptance in academia is Virtual Exchange, which facilitates interaction between students and academics from different geographical locations. The construct of Global Competence is understood to encompass three dimensions: Self-Awareness, Intercultural Competence, and Global Knowledge. Additionally, three types of motivation are identified: Mandatory, Rewarded, and Self-motivation. However, little is known about how students' motivation to participate in Virtual Exchange acts as a moderating factor in relation to the dimensions of Global Competence. This study aims to measure the moderating effect of students' motivation on Global Competence using the Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) technique. The analysis modelled the relationship between Global Competence, its three dimensions, and the three types of motivation. Data were collected through a questionnaire administered to higher education students from various countries who had participated in virtual exchange projects. The study’s results indicate a significant moderating effect of students' motivation to participate in Virtual Exchange projects on Global Competence, specifically within the Intercultural Competence dimension. No significant effects were found for the Self-Awareness and Global Knowledge dimensions. The findings suggest that students who expect to be rewarded for participating in Virtual Exchange programs show better results in the development of Intercultural Competence. In contrast, lower results are anticipated for students whose participation is motivated by mandatory requirements or self-motivation.

Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) has emerged as an increasingly important approach to internationalization at home, offering students opportunities for sustained intercultural interaction without physical mobility. However, less is known about how students in Asian contexts negotiate identity through such virtual exchange. This study aims to examine how university students in Japan (N = 41) with an average CEFR B1 level proficiency negotiated their identities during a COIL virtual exchange (VE) project with university students in China (N = 35). Drawing upon qualitative data from final written reflections, this study highlights how students in Japan described cultural differences in essentialist and critical ways. Findings suggest that VEs like COIL can serve as a catalyst for identity negotiation by prompting students to both reproduce and question cultural stereotypes. While some students expressed essentialist comparisons, others demonstrated a certain degree of emerging critical awareness by recognizing the diversity within cultural groups as well as their own shifting perspectives. These results highlight the importance of structured pedagogical scaffolding in VEs to facilitate learners seeing beyond simplistic cultural binaries toward more flexible, inclusive intercultural identities.

Advances in technology have enabled students to interact more effectively in virtual exchange (VE) projects across institutions and countries. However, there are still challenges and barriers that need to be addressed (O’Dowd, 2023). This paper reports Japanese students’ perceptions of a video letter assignment in an asynchronous VE project as their first experience of communicating using English and ICT. This preliminary study focuses on the video letter exchange which was conducted as an additional task during the project. The comments of the reflection sheets revealed that they were able to overcome some difficulties and learn through the video letter exchange. It was found that the video letter assignment in the VE project provided an opportunity to learn English expressions and other cultures, to experience differences with partners’ cultures, and express their messages confidently.

This practice report explores the integration of Design Thinking (DT) into virtual exchange (VE) projects to enhance students’ engagement with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite increasing interest in VE and SDGs, there is a lack of research on effective DT practices in VE contexts. This paper fills this gap by identifying best practices: integrating intercultural dialogue principles, fostering multicultural collaboration, and assigning coaches to student teams. These strategies were implemented in a VE involving three institutions across the Middle East, North Africa, and the U.S. Results from both a quantitative survey and qualitative reflections indicate that the combination of DT, intercultural dialogue, and effective coaching not only facilitated students’ understanding and engagement with global issues related to SDGs but also enhanced their professional skills such as creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. This paper contributes best practices for educators aiming to leverage DT for SDGs in VE settings.

Assessing the skills of the students who take part in a Virtual Exchange (VE) project is a challenging and complicated task, especially if it aims to engage both the students and VE co-organisers in the feedback and evaluation process. The objective of this chapter is to outline the pedagogical design of a business communication skills course and present how a VE component and its assessment were integrated into the core course syllabus. The text explains how all the members of the created VE learning community were involved in defining the skills to be developed by the students. Pedagogical choices were made that involved the design of the learning path, the design of the VE activities, and the course assessment in such a way that everyone had a precise role to play. In particular, the chapter focuses on how different assessment tools prompted the students to reflect on the development of language competence while working together to prepare for a professional job interview in an international and collaborative learning setting.

This experience report presents an overview of the first experience of virtual exchange (O'DOWD, 2018, 2021) between students from the Federal University of Acre and the University of California, Davis, which occurred during the first semester of 2021. The project’s participants were experiencing emergency remote instruction and had to use their electronic devices to interact with their partners. The virtual exchange was a Teletandem partnership (TELLES, 2006, 2015; COSTA; SALOMÃO; ZAKIR, 2018; FERNANDES; TELLES, 2015). We describe how the partnership was established, the challenges, and the rewards for the interactants, the mediators and the professors involved in the project. Teletandem at UFAC is the first initiative of the project Intercultural Interchange Online Laboratory. The interactions took place from January to May, during which seven to eight interactions occurred, depending on the pedagogical scenario (FOUCHER, 2010). The data collected during the period followed a similar protocol established in Multec - Multimodal Teletandem Corpus (LOPES, 2019; ARANHA; LOPES, 2019). Considering the need for social distancing, interactants overcame their limitations with the lack of an institutional language laboratory by using their devices and internet connection to participate during the web conference meetings in order to develop interactional competence in English and Portuguese.

This paper provides an overview of the current state of academic research in event-tourism and its impact on the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs). Through a systematic review and bibliometric analysis of 159 articles, this study reveals a moderate alignment between the literature on sustainable event tourism and the UN SDGs. However, certain SDGs, such as No Poverty, Zero Hunger, and Gender Equality, have limited research attention in this context. This study also sheds light on under-researched stakeholders including sponsors, associations, and academic institutions. Drawing on the theory of change proposed by the UN Development Group and stakeholder analysis, the findings presented in this study serve as a bridge between theoretical frameworks and real-world applications. This study provides tangible solutions and strategies for aligning event-tourism practices with the principles and targets outlined in the UN SDGs.

Virtual exchange (VE) between different English language teaching (ELT) contexts can afford opportunities to develop intercultural communicative competence (ICC) while also offering a window to reflect on different realities in terms of ELT. To this end, two ELT programmes integrated a VE project into their syllabi to provide pre-service teachers with opportunities to experience VE with reflection and development of ICC. The present account aims to describe and reflect on the GAZUFES (Gazi University and UFES University) VE project that involved pre-service teachers, tutors, and teacher trainers in a university in Brazil and another in Türkiye. GAZUFES was in turn part of the large-scale Erasmus+ KA3 Policy Experimentation European Virtual Innovation and Support Networks for Teachers (VALIANT) project. The exchange had some positive outcomes, but the sudden return to in-person classes at the end of the pandemic in the Brazilian university negatively affected the integration of GAZUFES into the Brazilian curriculum and the number of participants from Brazil. Despite the unequal number of students involved in the project, those who participated were very motivated and engaged in reflective and stimulating interactions.

Virtual exchange (VE) is an emergent but promising trend in course internationalization, which consists of using technology to interact and work with another class located in another city/country to develop digital skills and intercultural competence. After a VE project was implemented in a sports-related communication course, students reflected on their experience in a short paper or a video. This case study is a qualitative analysis of these 17 reflections. Despite some complications, students indicated they learned much about cultural differences and would be keen to repeat the VE experience.

The technological revolution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has brought about new learning scenarios as well as new professional requirements, such as the development of intercultural and Foreign Language (FL) skills. In this regard, Virtual Exchange (VE) projects provide students with learning opportunities through online social interaction and collaboration (Dooly, 2017); allowing authentic intercultural experiences for students who do not have the opportunity of travelling (O’Dowd, 2016) and promoting 21st-century skills development (Jager, Kurek, & O’Rourke, 2016). However, interacting online in the FL with a person from a different culture can entail an affective challenge for students and might give rise to Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA). FLA is a dysphoric and situational anxiety suffered by one out of three FL students which inhibits communication and learning (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986). Due to the impossibility of finding an available tool to investigate the presence and effects of FLA in VE environments, the Telecollaborative FLA Scale (T-FLAS) was designed. This article presents the development of the T-FLAS, a 21-item questionnaire with a five-point Likert scale, aiming to provide researchers and practitioners with a tool to explore FLA in VE.

In recent decades, the convergence of technical and professional communication (TPC) with translation studies (TS) has underscored the necessity for collaboration across disciplinary borders. However, challenges remain, particularly in translating specialized texts deeply connected to local cultures. This paper investigates a virtual exchange (VE) project focused on translating multilingual menus, which pose unique challenges due to their embeddedness in local cultures. The study explores translators' strategies in dealing with culture-specific items (CSIs) and their collaboration with TPC writers representing the target audience. The methodology section outlines the case study's participants and dataset, while the results shed light on effective strategies and collaborative approaches in translating menus within a VE context. A key takeaway is that technical translation requires not only a deep understanding of the terminology and concepts of a specific field, but also a commitment to working with TPC writers and target audiences to transform source texts into usable and persuasive target texts – an approach that VE environments can uniquely support through authentic, cross-cultural collaboration.

<p>This mixed method case study explored globalization and complex relationships through a virtual exchange project between students from Germany and Colombia in upper intermediate level English classes. We believed by providing a space for online conversation, written collaboration and discussion, students would enhance their plurilingual and pluricultural competence as well as their communicative competences through the medium of English as an international language (EIL). The aim was also to enable students to investigate cultural complexity and to develop cultural curiosity. Taking into account plurilingual and pluricultural competence (PPC) and the efficacy of virtual exchanges for language learning, we used a series of tasks for students to participate in a wide range of activities of varying complexity regarding German and Colombian culture for a six-week exchange. Students self-assessed their written and spoken online interactions as well as their perceived skills in mediating texts and communication based on the recently added descriptors in the Companion Volume to the CEFR. They also rated their plurilingual and pluricultural competences on a PPC scale at both the beginning and end of the project. Results demonstrate that there is value in implementing virtual exchange projects in which students reflect on and increase their awareness of these concepts also suggesting that pairing students with international students rather than L1 speakers of the language has a potentially positive effect on students’ anxiety level and communicative competences. </p>

This study derives its foundation from the outcomes of a Virtual Exchange initiative, involving 73 students from three distinct universities: Budapest Business University, Hungary; University of Sfax, Tunisia and Ismir Democracy University, Turkey. The project provided an in-depth exploration of the three countries from diverse angles, including cultural, social, historical, sociological, gastronomic, and various other perspectives, as observed, and presented by university students. In 8-month research the author examined the cognitive, behavioural, motivational, and cultural aspects of cultural intelligence of university students before and after the 6-week long Virtual Exchange project and compared the pre-and post-project results. The paper summarizes the results of a research carried out in 2024. In this research, the author scrutinized the levels of sensitivity among students both prior to and following collaborative work within a cross-cultural project with their international counterparts. The study aimed to ascertain whether engagement and collaboration within a multinational environment yield supplementary values, as well as identifying the specific soft skills cultivated through such collaborative endeavours. The results indicate that engagement in collaborative international projects with foreign peers can significantly enhance cultural sensitivity.

Social Virtual Reality (VR) applications enable real-time interpersonal conversation and allow users to perform activities together. They have the potential of changing the ways learners practise speaking a foreign language. Following a previous study (Jauregi Ondarra, Gruber, & Canto, 2020), we designed the present study to explore how presence, immersion, and interactivity affect overall social experience. Students from Germany and the Netherlands engaged in High-immersion VR (HiVR) virtual exchange sessions, using Spanish as a lingua franca at A2 level. International dyads carried out four interaction tasks in AltspaceVR, using head-mounted devices. To examine students’ HiVR virtual exchange experiences, different sources of data were gathered: questionnaires, reflection diaries, recordings, and focus group interviews. The preliminary results, based on the surveys and reflection journals, show that students liked to use a social VR app to communicate in the target language with peers from other countries, as they felt completely immersed and co-present in the social interactive VR space. This might enhance engagement and lower anxiety levels.