2.3.1 Virtual exchange in practice
Virtual exchanges are increasingly more commonplace as access to information and communication technology – internet, digital devices – has become more prevalent in classrooms around the globe. Virtual exchange projects also enabled continuity of learner collaboration when student mobility was substantially undermined during the Covid-19 pandemic. Virtual exchange can be used within any programme of study, including within teacher education to help prepare teachers for the classrooms of the future.
Virtual exchange in education has been around much longer than is commonly assumed. Kern (2013) finds the origins of this pedagogy in school pen-pal exchanges in the early 1920s. In the early 1990s, with the emergence of the internet as a potential tool for learning, exploration into virtual exchange as a means of promoting collaboration projects between learners really burgeoned.
The early virtual exchanges mainly focused on language learning and utilised an e-tandem pedagogical model (O’Dowd and Dooly, 2020). In e-tandem, native speakers of different languages communicated together with the aim of learning the other’s language.
Subsequently, virtual exchange practices began to move towards more comprehensively integrated online projects within programmes of study. They aimed to promote not only language competences in learners, but many other skills from digital literacy to climate citizenship. These projects also included more collaborative work, such as: constructing websites together, student-to-student ethnographic interviews in synchronous online sessions, deliberate reflection on intercultural perspectives in shared forums based on news articles, and a more recent 3D pilot programme at Harvard University that involved complete immersion and interaction with other cultures (Mills, 2018).
The complexity of the virtual exchange has increased over time, not only in the duration and configuration and implementation of the activities required (O’Dowd and Dooly, 2020), but also in the integration of numerous multimodal communication media. Virtual exchange learners are often required to pay attention to written, aural, and visual input at the same time, as well as to pay attention to other tasks associated with collaborative learning, such as adjusting their behaviour to overcome the lack of understanding with their project partners, when needed, and find an effective way to divide the work in the tasks.