Integrating intercultural competence development into university curriculum through intercultural virtual collaborationA task-sequence proposal and implementation

Resumen

Intercultural competence has become an essential tool to navigate every-day life in increasingly diverse communities and workplaces. Therefore, Intercultural Virtual Collaboration (IVC) has been increasingly employed by teachers to connect students from different locations to develop this and other related competences. Still, despite its demonstrated potential to enhance learning, IVC has not yet become an integrative part of university curriculum given the complexity involved in its implementation. For this reason, there is a demand for developing and sharing models for the development of intercultural competence through IVC. In this context, this doctoral thesis proposed to: (1) design a comprehensive teaching-learning strategy/task-sequence for the development of intercultural competence in Higher Education through IVC based on the review of the literature on the subject, (2) analyze students’ perceptions of the effect of the proposed task-sequence in their development of intercultural competence and (3) explore how much students enjoy participating in each task of the sequence proposed. First, a task-sequence was designed based on the typology of tasks proposed by O’Dowd & Ware (2009) and informed by other important works from the literature. Secondly, the task-sequence was implemented in two different IVC projects, each of them involving universities from two different countries. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected during the second implementation through pre-posttests, after-task questionnaires and a final satisfaction survey. The results obtained showed that students perceived that the sequence proposed had a positive effect on their level of intercultural competence, especially developing indicators related to intercultural relationship building, intercultural teamwork, intercultural knowledge and intercultural awareness. Results also evidenced that most students enjoyed participating in the tasks proposed and would recommend the task-sequence to be implemented again with new students.