Internationalising Teaching and Learning via Virtual Mobility

By Tiffany Ko

Supporting student mobility is one of the six foci of CoP – ITL. While it is generally taken as the facilitation of study-abroad opportunities, we are eager to enrich the discussion by exploring how information and communication technologies create capacities for virtual mobility—engaging students in cross-cultural exchange without having to cross the national border—in the university setting. Held on 17 April 2019 at HKBU, we invited three members from our partner institutions to share their wise practices with 30 participants at our sixth Join-the-Conversation event entitled “How Does Virtual Mobility Enhance Internationalisation of the Curriculum?”.

Dr Susan Bridges, Assistant Dean of the Faculty of Education and Associate Professor of the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at HKU, talked us through two of her recent projects. One project was about lining up Dentistry students from HKU and those of other countries for an online group project. Another project is called “The Ideal School”. It engaged Education students from HKU as well as those from three other universities in Sweden, South Africa and New Zealand in the investigation of education philosophy. Students in this programme were guided to participate in online forum discussions before setting off for a field visit to a high school in Sweden. Participants appreciated how the blending of physical and virtual exchange experience encouraged them to reconsider the education norms ingrained in Chinese and Hong Kong cultures.

The next speaker, Dr Tushar Chaudhuri from HKBU, made notes on how virtual mobility plays a complementary role in facilitating physical mobility. As the Programme Coordinator of European Studies (Germany), he explicated how the “Giessen-Hong Kong Telecollaborative Language Learning Project” prepared students for the mandatory exchange in Germany in their third study year. Each HKBU student was paired up with a student majoring in teaching German as a foreign language in Germany. Instead of assigning the latter to be the “language tutor” of the former, the project encouraged all participating students to co-investigate the challenges in German learning and teaching via the discussion of a global issue: What makes a city healthy? The teacher emphasised that, by grounding the language and cultural exchange on the exploration of common social issues, students could communicate in a more natural manner with less negative influence from the tutor-student hierarchy.

Our third speaker, Dr Suk Wai Winnie Leung from HKUST, articulated that she embedded cross-national design thinking into a course from the School of Engineering. In her “Global Product Development” course, students from HKUST, Seoul, and Beijing formed mixed and interdisciplinary teams to develop marketable global products and engage in business pitching. In between the face-to-face group meetings and field visits to the three cities, students exchanged ideas on product development via WeChat which is the platform compatible to all students.

The three presentations had inspired an energetic Q and A session. The topics covered such as (1) the way to assess intercultural awareness cultivated through virtual exchange opportunities; (2) the support that universities provide for teachers to develop and implement virtual exchange initiatives; and (3) the value of physical exchange in virtual mobility projects. The thought-provoking event was rounded up by Dr Tracy Zou’s remarks on the latest development of CoP – ITL.