Abstract :
The research into failures and successes of class to class Online Intercultural Exchange (OIE) or Virtual Exchange (VE) projects has shown repeatedly (Lewis & O’Dowd, 2016) that proper pedagogical and technical training and support is a key factor for teachers being able to develop (and sustain) successful projects which meet intended student learning outcomes and improvement of teachers' pedagogical skills.
As a result of these findings, the EU funded EVOLVE project (http://www.evolve-erasmus.eu), provides training and mentoring support to teachers from institutions in Europe and beyond who are planning for a Virtual Exchange across disciplines. Although the EVOLVE training materials are meant to be shared with institutions as Open Educational Resources, the challenge to make sure that teachers from both institutions receive the necessary support for their particular institutional context, remains.
In order to overcome this barrier, a team of educational support and Virtual Exchange experts from the EVOLVE project leader University of Groningen (UG) and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), are collaboratively developing a self paced basic online multimodal training targeted at teachers from both institutions who wish to run a VE together. After the training, teachers at both sides will continue receiving local support from the expert team at the own institution during the preparation and implementation phases of the project.
This presentation will report on the impact of the transversal aspects of language and culture at play in the online international collaborative design and implementation phases of the training and the VE’s resulting from it. We will do this by focusing our quantitative and qualitative analysis on language use and intercultural learning.
Lewis, T. & O’Dowd, R. (2016). An introduction to Online Intercultural Exchange and this Volume. In O’Dowd, R. & Lewis, T. (Eds.) Online Intercultural Exchange: Policy, Pedagogy, Practice, chapter 1 (pp. 3-20). Abingdon: Routledge.
