Below is the list of active international and European projects on telecollaboration and virtual exchange organized by members of UNICollaboration. If you are a member and wish to have a current project featured on this page, please contact info@unicollaboration.org with the following information about your project: Project title, dates of project, project logo, brief (max 250 word) description, web link.
EVALUATE
EVALUATE was a European Policy Experiment project funded by Erasmus+ Key Action 3. The project was led by Robert O’Dowd at the University of León and involved many UNICollaboration members.
Between 2017-2019, the project consortium trained teacher trainers and organised virtual exchanges which involved over 1,000 student teachers at initial teacher education institutions. This entailed students interacting and collaborating with partner classes from other countries as an integral part of one of their courses. The research team then analysed the learning gains from these exchanges using qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. They also worked with representatives from European ministries of education to understand how virtual exchange could be upscaled in teacher education across Europe.
A collection of publications and training materials developed by the project team are available here:
Our European Policy Experiment report is available for download here. You can read the full report and the executive summary here.
You can also download the Telecollaborative Training Manual for Teacher Trainers which was developed for the project.
You can download the task sequences used during our study.
And watch this short animated video which explains how Virtual Exchange works in Initial Teacher Education and how EVALUATE carried out its exchange programme:
For more information on the work of EVALUATE, contact Robert O’Dowd (robert.odowd@unileon.es) or visit the EVALUATE website.
EVOLVE
The EVOLVE project (Evidence-Based Online Learning through Virtual Exchange), funded through the Erasmus+ Forward Looking Cooperation Projects programme, aimed to mainstream Virtual Exchange as an innovative form of international learning in Higher Education institutions across Europe and beyond.
The project was carried out by a consortium of universities (Groningen, León, Grenoble, Open University UK, Jan Dlugosz PL, Padova, Warwick, Malmö), two virtual exchange providers (Soliya and Sharing Perspectives Foundation) and two large university networks (Coimbra Group and Santander Group). The project ran from January 2018 to December 2020 and was coordinated by Sake Jager, assistant professor in Applied Linguistics and project manager for ICT and Education at the Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen.
Re-useable resources
The training materials based on the successful ‘Co-Laboratory’ training format are available from the project website as Open Educational Resources, including a full copy of the course, downloadable in IMS Common Cartridge format (so that you can import it and adapt it in your own training environment).
For details, go to: https://www.evolve-erasmus.eu/training-resources.
Several research resources are also available from the site, including 5 reports on the impact of Virtual Exchange at institution, educator and student level. The research protocols, pre- and post-test surveys and portfolio templates can also be downloaded.
For details, go to: https://www.evolve-erasmus.eu/research-resources.
These resources will remain available for use until 2026.
For more information, contact evolve@rug.nl.
EVOLVE website: www.evolve-erasmus.eu