New publication: ‘Virtual Exchange and the Development of Transferable Skills: a Review of Practices Across Disciplines’

Following their conference on integrating innovative pedagogical practices within a virtual exchange, Dr Florence Le Baron-Earle (MLAL), and Dr Claire O’Reilly (UCC) co-edited a special issue entitled ‘Virtual Exchange and the Development of Transferable Skills: a Review of Practices Across Disciplines’. Some of the contributing authors are colleagues from the School of MLAL, namely Dr Marie-Thérèse Batardière, Dr Veronica O’Regan and Dr Michaela Schrage-Früh. The Special issue is available here: https://journal.unicollaboration.org/issue/view/5119

 The Special Issue opens with a Foreword by Professor Robert O’Dowd, University of León, setting out the current global workplace context, and discusses how Virtual Exchange (VE) and Task-Based Language Teaching can play their part in developing transferable skills and boosting participants ’employability.

 In the first contribution, which is a research article, the authors (Pintado-Gutiérrez, Gómez-Soler and Fernandez-Gutiérrez) present a case study exploring the benefits of pedagogical mentoring in students in the context of learning through and with videoconferencing. The aim of the VE was to develop global and ecological mindedness in students. The authors delve into the effect of pedagogical mentoring on students in videoconferencing scenarios, but also discuss the transversal skills students acquired during the exchange and how the students saw application of their learning to real-life tasks. These real-life tasks included discussions of local ecological problems and engagement with specialised FL-vocabulary through the VE.

 The first (Schrage-Frühand Wehrmann) of four practice reports explores the lesser-known concept of autoethnography in VE settings, and explains how the authors’ narrative approach of their students’ own cultural context and experience contributed to raising their glocal cultural awareness and skills of interpreting and relating, among other transferable skills.

 In the second practice report (Dey-Plissonneau, Gómez-Soler, Lee, Liu, Scriney and Smeaton),the focus shifts to the context of videoconferencing in VE. The authors present a novel web-based system called L2L and the characteristics of its visual metrics, which enables students to reflect critically on their online interaction and learn from them for future teletandem sessions. In this cross-disciplinary approach to student learning– which was integrated into several language courses across ten European universities and deployed for three consecutive semesters involving 926students – evidence shows the development of confidence and learner-autonomy, as well as metacognitive skills in learners.

 The third contribution (O’Regan, Le Baron-Earle and Batardière) highlights the value of VE in facilitating Internationalisation at Home. It reports on the recently developed Erasmus Speaks project, which was implemented during COVID-19 travel restrictions and involved over 600 students across Europe. The award-winning project illuminates how the task design helped to foster intercultural awareness, hone digital literacy and develop linguistic competence as students worked together.

 Continuing with an environmental theme seen earlier, the final paper (Evain, Moore and Hawkridge) focuses on an online pedagogy in what the authors term ‘Virtual Environmental Challenge’ (VEC). This timely intervention discusses the integration of Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) within VE taking a cross-disciplinary approach, and showcases mentoring opportunities for teachers-in-training which the authors describe as ‘teamchers’.

 The papers presented in this Special Issue on transferable/transversal skills reflect some of the real-world challenges in the classroom; shedding light on how students learn well in virtual exchange, engaging them in web-based learning and developing their digital literacies, unfolding learning about self in bicultural and bilingual settings, and finally here, showcasing evidence for the sustainable development of VE as an increasingly persuasive and dialogic mode of teaching and learning in higher education.