Integrating Intercultural Competence development into the curriculum through Telecollaboration. A task sequence proposal for Higher Education

Abstract

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.

Introduction to Effective Teaching of Technical Communication

“…The strong points outweigh the weak points, as students show positive perceptions of their telecollaborative projects, seen as a way of developing their competencies and enriching their learning experience, a finding aligned with previous research on telecollaboration (Ferreira et al, 2018;Kohn & Hoffstaedter, 2017) where students show high levels of engagement, building rapport at a distance (Vinagre & Esteban, 2018). Other responses referred to the specifics of the different projects rather than telecollaboration in general.…”

“…Regarding the design of activities, some valuable suggestions were made by students and graduates, mostly (i) simplifying tasks and increasing exposure to communication with foreign partners, (ii) connecting technical communication with other courses, and (iii) connecting with real companies. In terms of planning and implementation, care has to be taken to integrate online and classroom work in a meaningful way (Ferreira et al, 2018).…”

Developing business students’ intercultural competence through intercultural virtual collaboration: a task sequence implementation

“…The task sequence adopted was developed by Ferreira-Lopes et al (2018) based on the typology of tasks proposed by O'Dowd and Ware ( 2009) and other works from the literature. The sequence intends to be flexible and customizable to different Higher Education courses and fields and, for each task, the authors provide detailed instructions including steps to be taken, pedagogical strategy adopted, expected learning outcomes, tools to be used and estimated workload.…”

Fostering intercultural competence through videoconference exchange: using an external provider to match learners with trained native speakers and administer video calls

“…Despite its potential for the development of IC, the integration of telecollaboration into the curriculum remains marginal and challenging. Teacher-to-teacher relationships, course organization, technical issues, differences in timetables, matching of learners, workload, and curricular limitations are reasons for teachers to disregard the possibility of creating a telecollaboration project (see also Ferreira-Lopes, Bezanilla, & Elexpuru, 2018). While some adjustments can relieve educators of the time burden that the organization of telecollaboration projects imposes (e.g.…”

“…While some adjustments can relieve educators of the time burden that the organization of telecollaboration projects imposes (e.g. Helm, 2015;O'Dowd, 2018), there remains a need to develop sustainable instructional design models and to address the main barriers to the integration of telecollaboration in higher education (Ferreira-Lopes et al, 2018).…”