2022-12-01 –, Virtual Stage, BBAW
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.
This abstract will be presented in the Virtual Exchange and Mobility Track and will be in presentation format. Some presenters will attend the conference in presence and others will be online.
This presentation aims to show the impact of a five-year multidisciplinary virtual exchange project between Germany, Portugal, the USA and Canada on teachers’ digital competences. The presentation will describe how five teachers from four different countries have developed their digital competences in a multidisciplinary virtual exchange project by applying the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu, 2017). In order for students to be successful 21st century citizens, they must be able to use digital technologies in their personal and professional lives. To help them in this process, it is imperative that teachers have a certain level of digital competence to instill these competences in their students. It is therefore important to first identify the level of digital competence teachers have and what they can do to improve their levels. The DigCompEdu framework was applied to five teachers who have been working together for five years on a sustainable virtual exchange project. These teachers were initially at the Explorer level (A2), according to this framework. The results indicate that all five teachers progressed throughout the five years of the project to the Expert level (B2) of the same framework. The presentation will explain the six areas of the framework: professional engagement, digital resources, teaching and learning, assessment, empowering learners, and facilitating learners’ digital competence, that these teachers went through to develop their digital competence.
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.
Maria de Lurdes Martins is a faculty member at the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, where she teaches English for Tourism to undergraduate students. She holds a PhD in Linguistics (2012) from the University of Aveiro. Her research interests include virtual exchange, technology in foreign language teaching/, intercultural collaboration, Web 2.0 enhanced foreign language learning, dialogical and dialectical language learning and social networked language learning. She is one of the co-founders of the Consortium of Virtual Exchange. She has been part of virtual exchange projects since 2014.
Areas of expertise: virtual mobility, digitally mediated international collaboration, international project planning and management, higher education, school education, vocational training, e-learning, language learning, languages for specific purposes.
Wendi Hulme is a Professor in the School of Design at Fanshawe College, teaching in the Bachelor of Interior Design (Honours) program. As a registered (educator) Interior Designer with ARIDO, Wendi has 20+ years of practical experience in Canada and the USA on residential and commercial projects including retail, hospitality and corporate design. She is a Council for Interior Design Accreditation Site Visitor and LEED Accredited Professional with her research interests focused on sustainability and virtual exchange.
Regina C. Brautlacht is appointed Commissioner for Global Digital Learning and Senior Lecturer in Business Communication and Entrepreneurship at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Germany. She leads three virtual mobility projects (DIF, IVAC-BAIN, and Virtual Mobility for All). She is a member of the Commission for Teaching and Learning, the Commission for Quality Assurance in Teaching and the Commission for International Affairs. She has initiated the network for digital internationalization in NRW and is Deputy Director of the Consortium of Virtual Exchange (CoVE). She has served as an expert in digital learning and virtual exchanges on different panels. He holds a Master's in Media Education from the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Middle Tennessee State University, USA
Dr. Kristi Julian is a Professor and Program Director at Middle Tennessee State University. Dr. Julian is a founding member of the Council of Virtual Exchange (CoVE) and is currently serving as the Executive Director. Her research interests focus on interior design pedagogy, design thinking, virtual exchange, and sustainability. In addition to project coordination as the ProGlobe U.S. project partner, she has conducted feasibility studies, and exchanges in U.S., Italy, Greece, and Argentina. She is part of the MTSU Online Intercultural Exchange (MTOIE) grant initiative at San Juan Bautista University in Peru and Maza University in Argentina. She serves as a faculty mentor for the MTSU/AUK U.S. State Department grant, American-Style Higher Education in Iraq and is an advisory board member for the American University of Kurdistan Design Department. She served on the DAAD Funding Selection Committee in 2021. She is the Associate Editor, for Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences (URJHS) and is an accreditation site visitor chair.