Virtual Exchange (VE) in higher education often involves small, online working groups who meet outside of class time. This lack of teacher presence in the meetings has its advantages (e.g. more student-centred, more autonomous environments); however, it also presents challenges for assessment. This chapter introduces an online platform called…

If a picture says a thousand words, how much can a 360° image say? How can experiencing (or understanding) other languages and cultures be conveyed in immersive experiences? The Digital Learning Team at the University of Southampton has been developing innovative resources whilst piloting the use of Thinglink, a subscription- and browser-based…

Compensatory strategies play an important role in second language (L2) processing because of limited language knowledge and ensuing anxiety and could help assure understanding and void communication breakdown. Previous studies about compensatory strategies largely adopt laboratory settings and neglect the strategies in authentic oral…

Exeter students who had their 2019-2020 Year Abroad (YA) cut short by the COVID-19 health crisis were offered alternative online language provision to support their learning. This contribution discusses the students and staff's experience in the light of 'learning is a journey' metaphor. [For the complete volume, "Languages at Work, Competent…

UK higher education institutions strive to foster learner autonomy in their students to create more successful learners, yet due to its complex nature, educators and academics continue to search for effective ways to achieve this. This case study investigates how one virtual blogging space on the Independent Learning (IL) pre-sessional module at…

Virtual Exchanges (VEs) are flourishing yet there are still few courses in higher education that offer in-service teachers the fundamental theoretical and practical knowledge necessary to organize and conduct a telecollaborative project in their own educational settings. This paper aims to provide a resource to teacher educators and course…

This chapter showcases the implementation of an E+VE (Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange) project in a 'broadening module' (elective content-specific modules offered across the university curricula) at the University of Limerick (UL), entitled 'Communication Across Cultures'. The pedagogical approach follows a blended learning model where face-to-face…

Empathy is widely perceived and understood as an unquestioned component of Intercultural Competence (IC). The authors see the ability to empathise with others and to see their point of view as an important condition for developing an ethnorelative viewpoint, and therefore consider it important to incorporate activities into the intercultural…

Virtual simulation training has gained in usage in various educational fields and offers the potential to support and reinforce learning goals when practical experience is not possible. Teaching practice experience in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom is critical, yet frequently unobtainable for students in Teaching English to…

This case study outlines an example of cooperative online learning for teaching business communication skills at a Hungarian and a Belgian university. During this eight week long Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (E+VE) project, students collaborated online in virtual teams on a weekly basis to complete the following main missions: (1) giving constructive…

In this paper, we outline the structure, goals, and lessons from our international teaching and learning collaboration in the spring 2015 semester. We took two public affairs courses with students in a U.S. and a Colombian university and combined them into a single hybrid course with the use of technology. The main goals of the course were to…

The technical institutions Institut Mines Télécom in Albi, France (IMT) and Trier University for Applied Sciences at the Environmental Campus of Birkenfeld, Germany (UCB) have been running Virtual Exchange (VE) projects since 2013. These projects allow the French and German students to use the vocabulary learned in class in a real context and to…

This chapter presents how I integrated Virtual Exchange (VE) programmes delivered by Soliya in two courses at an international undergraduate liberal arts and sciences college. In both cases the VE programme was fully integrated in the courses as a graded element. The students of beginner Italian participated in the four-week long Connect Express.…

This chapter presents a Transnational Virtual Exchange (VE) Project (TEP) developed in partnership between a Spanish and a Hungarian university. During this semester-long project, students worked in mixed virtual teams exploring selected topics related to the economics of the European Union. This report provides the details of the planning,…

Twitter has over 326 million monthly active users with the number of daily users growing every year since 2016 and is increasingly used by students and academics to interact and build online learning communities. For distance language learners, Twitter offers an open, free, and accessible environment for interaction and engagement which is…