Integrating Intercultural Competence development into the curriculum through Telecollaboration. A task sequence proposal for Higher Education

Abstract

Despite its demonstrated potential to enhance students’ Intercultural Competence and other 21st century skills, telecollaboration still fails to be fully integrated into university courses. Literature shows that there is a need for developing sustainable instructional design models for this purpose. Hence, the main goal of this work is to propose a theory-informed task sequence to facilitate the integration of telecollaboration into university courses for the development of Intercultural Competence. Based on the typology of tasks from O’Dowd & Ware (2009) and enriched with contributions from other authors, the task sequence: (1) facilitates the development of Intercultural Competence according to EMIC model and adds a new block to its composition in order to approach the specificities of virtual teamwork, (2) contains detailed instructions for each task, (3) provides guidelines on implementation, on the selection of technology and on the integration of tasks to the syllabi and (4) offers an assessment plan, accompanied by a list of learning evidences that are expected to be manifested by students per task. This sequence can serve as a reference for further adaptations to diverse contexts. It is currently being piloted in two telecollaborative projects and the results are expected to contribute to future improvements.