Connecting Classrooms Globally via Virtual Exchange

by Megan Gibbons, Director of the Center for Global Connections

The field of virtual exchange (VE) has grown considerably in the last fifteen years, but you may have many questions about the nature of VE and how it works.

Let’s start with a definition from the Virtual Exchange Coalition: “Virtual exchanges are technology-enabled, sustained, people-to-people education programs…Employing a wide variety of platforms and educational pedagogy, virtual exchanges teach participants 21st century skills that prepare them to more effectively deal with difference and to collaborate and communicate across cultures, thereby enhancing global peace and prosperity” (emphasis mine). I’m deliberately drawing your attention to the words in bold, because much of the confusion about the field stems from misunderstandings related to those words and phrases.

VE can be embedded into classes that are face-to-face, hybrid, or fully online, which makes it flexible and dependent upon technologies that most institutions already use regularly (a learning management system, videoconferencing software, file-sharing, etc.) Unlike a MOOC where information is put out into the world for mass consumption, VE connects people to one another by designing activities that are collaborative in nature and often project-based. The work completed by students is, therefore, connected explicitly to learning outcomes predetermined by instructors or facilitators (i.e. rooted in educational pedagogy).

Lastly, learning how to collaborate and communicate across cultures takes time—hence the emphasis on sustained. Most VE programs run for a minimum of 4 weeks with some running the entire length of a traditional academic semester. One last myth to bust is that VE is predominantly synchronous in nature. It isn’t. In fact, about 80% of the work is asynchronous, an important consideration when multiple time zones are involved.

So why should you consider adding virtual exchange to your teaching? VE helps you to deliver global learning experiences to students worldwide who cannot participate in traditional education abroad programs. In the U.S. context, this is 90% of undergraduates. Even before Covid-19, virtual exchange was gaining traction in the higher education world for its ability to develop/hone 21st-century skills such as digital literacy, communication, flexibility, global awareness, and problem solving. As much as your students stand to benefit, it’s just as important to emphasize how you may also benefit from the experience:

1. Gain research and scholarship opportunities in your own discipline as well as in the VE and SoTL fields

2. Expand and/or (re)engage your professional network

3. Increase/enhance your knowledge of another culture and its higher education system

4. Reinvigorate a class or design a new one with an innovative teaching method that highlights the Regis distinction

5. Dismantle institutional and national silos (you’ll be working with a colleague and an institution abroad as well as with various Regis units: CII, ITS, CGC, Academic Affairs)

6. Support retention efforts by engaging in High Impact Programming without having to go abroad yourself

If you are intrigued but feeling nervous about your tech skills, don’t let this stop you from learning more. Successful and effective VE practitioners are flexible, team players open to interdisciplinary teaching in an intercultural context. They don’t mind sharing their knowledge and their teaching materials with others, and they are willing to make changes to an existing syllabus such that the VE module is truly embedded as opposed to an add on.

If you have a colleague abroad with whom you would like to work and they are willing to complete some training with you, we’ll support you both from start to finish. And if you don’t have a partner in mind, we’ll look to our institutional partnerships to find someone who is also willing to give VE a try.

If you have a few more minutes, watch the video below before you go. You’ll see for yourself how VE can provide access to global learning for all.

For more information about how to enhance your teaching with virtual exchange, please contact Megan Gibbons, Director of the Center for Global Connections, at megan.gibbons@regiscollege.edu.

#globallearning #remoteteaching #virtualexchange