FRAMEWORKS FOR THE DEPLOYMENT OF VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS
Virtual Classrooms
About
Offering classes online rather than in person is an attractive pedagogical and learning opportunity; and such initiatives alleviate the need for inclusive access to high quality teaching. In the context of internationalization, doing a class project along with peer students from different countries opens amazing opportunities. Virtual classrooms have their limitations.
Types
Student Exchanges: As it indicates, students take courses from a different university from the comfort of their homes. Home and host institutions try to replicate other experiences related to the exchange. In some cases, and depending on how large the virtual exchange is, students have many courses they can choose from. They have to contend with the fact that the course takes place online, preventing them from absorbing the full extent of a in-person intercultural exchange.
Learning Approaches
For Student Exchanges: The virtual inbound exchange student joins a class created for the local students, and adapt to its requirements. In that process, they can obtain a meaningful experience -at least from far away. The learning in this case is based on the quality of the course in question.
Partner Involvement
For Student Exchanges: For both the home and host universities, no major additional tasks are necessary for operationalizing virtual student exchanges. However, it is important to measure its learning impacts including the quality of intercultural skill developments. It is widely believed that in-person student exchanges offer high quality learning opportunities for intercultural competency development.
Expectations
Flexibility: Topics that favour debate are potential candidates.
Time Zones: When time difference is a challenge, instructors require asynchronous and synchronous solutions.
Technology is required: Standard and reliable use of technology enable the provision of virtual classrooms.
No formal agreements: Universities don't require accords.
Between two classes: Institutions allow their instructors to jointly offer a course with a peer instructor from a different university. Here the two instructors agree to combine a portion of their classes in an effort to offer their students the opportunity to engage. This approach provides very interesting learning outcomes for the two classes as the students navigate the completion of assignments. Instructors have autonomy of their curriculum allowing the deployment of these types of virtual classrooms.
Between the two classes: The learning innovation starts as the two instructors offer the classes together and in line with creating the opportunities that only come with two groups of students coming together to explore a course topic. This form of teaching allows instructors from many fields to internationalize their curriculum and increase student participation.
Between two classes: Instructors have the opportunity to teach virtual classrooms in this modality over a number of years; and it can deepen the pedagogical potentials that come emerge. It is the innovation of instructors that makes all of the difference in the quality of experience for students. As a result, this type of virtual classrooms are highly recommended and easy to deploy.
