PhD or Masters students as well as others who are researching VE, join this group. email apveachair@gmail.com with your information and you will be added.
For researchers of VE
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APVEA: dedicated to bringing the students of this vast region closer together through virtual exchange.
APVEA promotes the IVEProject as one project that will ensure your students can participate in VE. Of course, there are many other VE that are available and the Stevens Initiative and Unicollaboration are places you can look if the IVEProject is not for you.Wonderful to see the third iteration of the Stevens Institute report on the state of Virtual Exchange is out now. You can read the report at this link https://www.stevensinitiative.org/resource/2022-survey-of-the-virtual-exchange-field-report/The position paper on Virtual Exchange (VE) created by the INTENT project group states that "Virtual exchanges are technology-enabled, sustained, people to people education programs. These entail the engagement of groups of students in online intercultural exchange, interaction and collaboration with peers from partner classes in geographically distant locations, under the guidance of educators and/or expert facilitators." It goes on to state that the "practice is also known as Collaborative online International Learning (COIL) and Globally Networked Learning (GNL)" which may have been the case when the paper was written in 2014, however now it is generally accepted that COIL (and GNL) is very different to VE, as COIL focuses on students' majors and areas of study and intercultural understanding being a "bonus", whereas VE has the development of intercultural understanding as the focus of the study and is generally a part of foreign language learning or culture studies.
APVEA aims to promote VE within the Asia Pacific. APVEA also wants to work with educators to improve the quality of these exchanges and research the most effective ways for them to ensure language and cultural development and understanding occurs.
The fourth biennial APVEA conference was held online due to the pandemic. We hope to have it face-to-face on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia in 2023.
The third biennial APVEA conference finished in May 2019. The book that eventuated from that conference was recently published and can be seen here.
A small group of PhD students is working on different aspects of VE using this platform. If you are a PhD or masters student researching VE and wish to join the group please email Eric Hagley at apveachair@gmail.com and he will add you to the group. It is free-of-charge to join (of course!).