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

Stories from Poland Anna Turula teaches at the School of English at the University of Wroclaw in Poland and we are welcoming her back for her second interview for our Blog! She previously worked at the Pedagogical University in Krakow. Despite changing institutions, Anna remains a committed virtual exchange enthusiast.

Eveke de Louw and Jos Beelen are from The Hague University of Applied Sciences, THUAS. Eveke works at the Centre of Expertise, Global and Inclusive Learning, where she conducts research into internationalisation at home. More specifically – internationalisation according to academic disciplines. She also researches the role of educational developers.

Suzi Cavalari is a teacher of English as a foreign language at São Paulo State University (campus São José do Rio Preto), Brazil and Marco Cappellini is a professor of linguistics education at the University of Lyon 1 and ICAR laboratory in France.   They’ve been effectively combining research from