Digital technologies have been used in Virtual Exchange for almost 20 years, even though online teaching has significantly changed since the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, I will talk about a few lessons learned from a recent web-based Virtual Exchange (VE) between University College Cork (UCC) and Fachhochschule Dresden-University of Applied Science (FHD). That exchange focused on life writing and biography, developing qualitative research skills, and speaking a foreign language. Claire from UCC and I reflected on students’ learning and our teaching experiences in a recently published open-access paper (you can find a link in the show notes). This episode of Managing Around will give you a glimpse of what the virtual exchange between our universities can offer. I will start with a brief description of the virtual collaboration and share with you some findings about students’ learning experiences, which we analysed based on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning motivated research. I conclude with some insights regarding the development of virtual exchange scenarios.

References:

Clarke, V., Braun, V., & Hayfield, N. (2015). Thematic analysis. In J. A. Smith (Ed.), Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods (pp. 222-248). Sage.

O’Dowd, R., (2022). Internationalising Higher Education and the Role of Virtual Exchange (Routledge Research in Higher Education Series). Routledge.

O’Reilly, C., & Arnold, M. (2022). Life-Writing and Virtual Exchange: An Exploration of the Impact on Students’ Learning Experiences. TEANGA, the Journal of the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics, 29, 13–38. https://doi.org/10.35903/teanga.v29i.2786

Sanders, V. (2018). Life Writing. In Oxford Bibliographies. https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199799558-0151

Winslow, D. J. (1995). Life-writing: A glossary of terms in biography, autobiography, and related forms. University of Hawai’i Press.

For more information, visit my blog: maik-arnold.de Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please leave a review on the iTunes / Apple Podcasts website. If you’ve got any thoughts on this episode, or if you’ve got an idea about new podcast topics or questions you’d like us to discuss, send an audio file or voice note to hi@profmanagement.de. For any non-audio comments, drop a tweet or DM to @profmanagement on Twitter or Instagram, please.