This week’s guest is Dawn Harris Wooten, a Facilitator and Program Manager located in Colorado, USA, whose passion it is to bring people closer by bridging differences between them. She believes virtual exchange can and does act as a conduit for building bridges and she says she is very proud

Eithne Knappitsch – a woman with many hats. Eithne’s main position is as professor of Intercultural Management in the Business School at Carinthia University of Applied Sciences. She’s been working there since 2008. The university is situated in the southern part of Austria and very close to the border with

Claudia Delfino is one of the coordinators of COIL/Virtual exchange at  Centro Paula Souza in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  Along with Patricia, who UNICollaboration interviewed here in October 2025, the CPS has 86 technological colleges called FATECs across the state of Sao Paulo with many COIL/VE projects ongoing within them.  “Some

UNICollaboration welcomes back our founding member, Mirjam Hauck, who also works at the Open University in the UK, and is a longtime researcher and practitioner of virtual exchange. For the past two years, Mirjam has been active in her new role, as academic lead, responsible for AI in learning, teaching

Jon Rubin is considered by many in the virtual exchange/COIL world as the father of this tech-based pedagogy. He’s been involved in COIL since 2001 and he helped start the SUNY COIL Center in 2006. During the last five years, Jon has been active at COIL Connect which supports the

Simone Hackett is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher at The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS)  She’s been a keen COIL/VE practitioner over many years, delivering, designing, and coordinating COIL. Furthermore, she has a lot of experience in conducting research on the topic. Especially testing the effectiveness of virtual exchange

Gabriel (Gabe) Flacks is a humanities educator and has been teaching at Champlain College for 19 years.  He’s also been an enthusiastic virtual exchange practitioner for about 15 years, “before I even knew the lingo,” he laughs.  His enthusiasm for VE ultimately led to him co-founding a piece of software

Jodie Birdman is part of Leuphanais scientific staff and an adjunct lecturer at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany. In the first instance, she studied teaching and education to be an English teacher in the United States. She has recently completed her PhD in Education for Sustainable Development with a focus

Marta Fondo is from the Open University of Catalonia (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya – UOC). She recently defended her PhD thesis around the topic of anxiety in foreign language learning and communication.  She used virtual exchanges for her research. This is something she says she has experienced herself both as