Paula Fonseca
Paula Fonseca is an assistant professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu (Portugal). She holds a PhD degree in Advanced English Studies from the University of Salamanca (Spain), a Master’s Degree in Teaching Languages from the University of Aveiro (Portugal) and a Master’s Degree in Education, Teaching English as a Second Language from Rhode Island College (USA). She has been teaching English and Spanish for specific purposes in higher education for over 25 years. She has collaborated in a number of international projects and has also participated in a number of international conferences. She is an integrated member of the Centre for Studies in Education and Innovation from the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu and a member of the Consortium of Virtual Exchange (COVE: https://www.cove.education). Her research interests include: virtual exchange, technology in foreign language teaching/learning, cognitive linguistics, multimodality, political humor, academic English and religious tourism.
Session
Virtual exchanges are not only beneficial for students but can also enhance educators’ digital competences. The European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (2017) has been applied to a virtual exchange project on sustainability to show how higher education (HE) teachers from two different continents have been able to improve their digital competence level while contributing to the internationalization of their HE institutions.