When centred on the professional exchange of skills and knowledge, overseas volunteering can be a beneficial form of professional development. In contrast to voluntourism where volunteers buy an overseas experience, professional-based overseas volunteering centres on professional collegiality and skill exchange which leads to greater professional…

The importance of internationalization and effective online collaborative learning is well established, and the recognized value of cross-cultural exchanges by higher education institutions has resulted in a diverse range of initiatives including the use of virtual exchanges. Virtual exchanges are global online learning experiences for students…

Student international mobility programmes (SIMPS) are often described as 'life altering' experiences, a pathway to raising social consciousness, as well as promoting cultural and social understanding. This qualitative research investigated the impact of SIMPs on seventeen students who took part in SIMPs during their course of study in two higher…

This pilot study focuses on a tool called L2L that allows second language (L2) learners to visualise and analyse their Zoom interactions with native speakers. L2L uses the Zoom transcript to automatically generate conversation metrics and its playback feature with timestamps allows students to replay any chosen portion of the conversation for…

E+VE-SFI (Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange -- Spain, France, Ireland) is a higher-education VE between students from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA), and the University of Limerick (UL). Its primary aim is to develop the speaking skills of undergraduates enrolled in foreign language programmes. Running over a…

This study analyses the results of two parallel two-month online exchange projects launched during the spring semester of 2018. The first project was a bilingual one-to-one English/Spanish exchange project for undergraduate business students. The second one was a monolingual one-to-many intercultural practice in English between native and…

This paper reports on two distinct models of telecollaboration--the Soliya Connect Program, a synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) project, and the Intercultural Franco-Irish Exchange, an asynchronous CMC project--which seek to provide students with a learning space to promote a more politically engaged and reflective pedagogy…

In recent years, going to a foreign country has become all the more significant for Higher Education (HE) students, as concepts such as internationalisation and intercultural competencies have gained a more prominent role in HE. For students to fully benefit from this experience, it is paramount to prepare them for their stay in a foreign country…

Undergraduate student mobility in Europe, which is seen as a desirable objective by the European communities, is examined in this study. The idea of mobility includes a term or year of study in a foreign country as well as stays of a month or two resulting from inter-university agreements or twinning schemes, or even periods of training that round…