Francesca Helm
Francesca Helm is associate professor of English at the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padova in Italy. Her research interests are in intercultural dialogue, virtual exchange and online education, language and education policies and critical internationalization studies. She is a board member of the academic organization UNICollaboration, and was responsible for monitoring and evaluation of the European Commission's Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (EVE) project which ran from 2018 to 2020. From 2018 to 2021 she was chair of the Education Innovation Working Group of the Coimbra Group of Universities. Since 2019 she has been co-coordinator of the Italian section of the international network Scholars at Risk.
Session
It is often assumed that intercultural learning will be an automatic outcome of engaging learners in virtual exchange, yet this is not always the case. The pedagogic design of the exchange and the partnership are some factors that can influence the learning outcomes. In this presentation findings regarding intercultural learning from several large-scale virtual exchange initiatives will be presented and discussed, as well as the implications.