Despite its demonstrated potential to enhance students' Intercultural Competence and other 21st century skills, telecollaboration still fails to be fully integrated into university courses. Literature shows that there is a need for developing sustainable instructional design models for this purpose. Hence, the main goal of this work is to propose a theory-informed task sequence to facilitate the integration of telecollaboration into university courses for the development of Intercultural Competence. Based on the typology of tasks from O'Dowd & Ware (2009) and enriched with contributions from other authors, the task sequence: (1) facilitates the development of Intercultural Competence according to EMIC model and adds a new block to its composition in order to approach the specificities of virtual teamwork, (2) contains detailed instructions for each task, (3) provides guidelines on implementation, on the selection of technology and on the integration of tasks to the syllabi and (4) offers an assessment plan, accompanied by a list of learning evidences that are expected to be manifested by students per task. This sequence can serve as a reference for further adaptations to diverse contexts. It is currently being piloted in two telecollaborative projects and the results are expected to contribute to future improvements.
Purpose Universities have increasingly been adopting intercultural virtual collaboration (IVC) to connect and develop the intercultural competence of students from different locations. However, the design and implementation of IVC have proved to be challenging, and thus there is a need for sharing positive experiences. This paper explores students’ overall impressions toward their participation in an IVC project involving a Spanish and Dutch university and discusses the on-going improvement process inherent to such practice. Design/methodology/approach This article presents (a) the results obtained from a content analysis of students’ feedback collected through a satisfaction survey, and (b) the observations of participating teachers on the challenges encountered during the implementation of the intercultural virtual collaborative project. Findings The analysis shows the potential of IVC to develop different aspects of students’ intercultural competence, especially intercultural teamwork, awareness and skills. Students appreciated the experience of working in intercultural teams, “the real-life application” of the project and the opportunity to gain cultural knowledge. At the institutional level, the biggest challenge related to aligning participating institutions’ courses, schedules, and grading systems. At the classroom level, it is argued that interaction between students should happen gradually. The discussion also approaches how partnerships between universities and companies could contribute to making training in intercultural virtual collaboration more authentic. Originality/value Given its impact on the development of students’ intercultural competence, the intercultural virtual collaborative project has been recognized as a best-practice in both universities, being officially incorporated into the curriculum of the participating institutions and replicated to other subject areas.
Purpose Allowing for interaction with foreign cultures without the need to travel, intercultural virtual collaboration represents a potential tool to develop business students’ intercultural competence. This study aims to explore students’ perceptions towards the implementation of a research-based task sequence in a project in which undergraduate Business students from Spain collaborated virtually with undergraduate business students from The Netherlands during a semester. More specifically, this paper investigates what intercultural competence indicators were mostly developed by the sequence implemented; how much each task from the sequence in question developed different intercultural competence indicators; and how much students enjoyed participating in each task. Design/methodology/approach Data was collected through after-task reflection questionnaires. A quantitative analysis of Likert-type questions was carried out and open-ended responses were used to illustrate findings. Findings Results reveal that the task sequence developed different dimensions of students’ intercultural competence and, particularly, fostered a positive attitude towards intercultural relationships, increased students’ cultural knowledge and awareness and equipped students with skills to work in diverse teams. It also showed that as complexity grew along the sequence, the average students’ perception of their intercultural competence development tended to decrease. The majority of students’ very much liked participating in the different tasks. Originality/value Designing telecollaborative projects can be very challenging and understanding the learning potential of different pedagogical strategies for virtual collaborative environments can help teachers to take better-informed decisions.
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