yes, this is the concept behind, but we hereby refer not only to that specific form (BM) but to VE as a whole, and we wanted in any case to stress both to keep in line with the overall project aims and targets, whereby we focus on BM too.

Dear Anna,

Thanks a lot for your kind comment. We totally agree with you, as proved by the scenarios we identified in the report, yet we have preferred to refer to both these two concepts to keep in line with the questions we posed at the very project beginning and with the overal project rationale, to make more intuitive and transparent the way we dealt with both VE and BM.

BM as a special form of VE?

BM and VE suggests that each is a separate construct. I believe – wrongly, maybe – that VE is an umbrella term. In this case BM would be a form of VE. As a result, the paragraph would require some changes.

Dear Jelly, we have hereby focussed on the most intuitive and immediate impact and benefit deriving from BM and VE for students and teachers respectively. You are indeed right, though, that participation in a VE can also contribute to the development of transversal skills for staff, thanks to the international and/or intercultural experience they have while designing/planning/implementing BM and VE.

Although the 2nd sentence mentions potential impact on the teachers site, I think it could be made more explicit that: BM and VE can contribute to increasing the number of teachers who benefit from an international and/or intercultural experience thus developing their transversal skills

In Virtual Exchanges, defined by the Virtual Exchange Coalition as “Technology-enabled, sustained people-to-people education programs”, students get together in a structured setting, as part of their education, using online and digital technology. In “Virtual exchange and Internationalisation at Home: navigating the terminology”, Beelen and O’Dowd note that Virtual Exchanges should not be confused with Virtual Mobility, where students follow online courses at educational institutions abroad without having to travel. By contrast, Virtual Exchanges are aimed at bringing students together into structured dialogue in an online environment in order to develop their intercultural and international competences. The core of Virtual Exchanges exists around the structured interactions, and collaboration, between students from different countries and cultural backgrounds.

Thank you Dirk for this valuable input and comment. Indeed VE implies interaction and cross-cultural communication, whereby the focus is not necessarily or not primarily on the online teaching.

I deem “virtual mobility” is a wider concept, which includes “virtual exchange”, whereby the focus of VE is more on the interaction and the peer-led approach. To this end, I would quote the following definitions for Virtual Mobility and Virtual Exchange as the point of departure for this Strategic Framework: whereby the focus of VM is on the cooperation of educational institutions as well as the recognition of the achievements, while that of VE is more on the interaction than on the access to the educational content of another course from another university:
Virtual mobility “the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to obtain the same benefits as one would have with physical mobility but without the need to travel” (Bijnens, Boussemaere, & Rajagopal, 2006, 20 p. 5)
 
“Virtual exchange […] is centred on the interaction and communication of geographically separated participants (Virtual Exchange Coalition, 2019). Instead of access to educational offers of cross-border universities, the focus is clearly on exchange, competence building, and interaction in small groups (European Commission, 2018). Administrators implementing these concepts in higher education are confronted with a variety of organisational, didactic, and administrative challenges.” (Schoop, Clauss & Askbar Safavi, 2020, pp. 19-20)

The terms virtual mobility and virtual exchange create an intuitive idea of distance interaction, whereby I am not thinking primarily of teaching, but rather of projects or integrative communication. The latter also plays a role in a new course of study of our university, which we have designed on the basis of the teaching experience in the pandemic, mostly online and completely in English. In addition to usual learning management platforms, video conferencing systems and virtual collaboration tools, we use other possibilities of exchange, especially instant messaging in partially prepared virtual rooms (by means of Discord server, Matrix-Element or similar technologies). The spatial structure is not based on the individual courses, but is also aimed at self-organisation and interaction, for example between different courses, projects, genders or languages.

This results in an agile structure that is very suitable for expanding stakeholder structures, be it international students or international lecturers. The lecturers or students of different universities thus become designers of virtual “houses” in which different topic typographies or user typographies can be organized. As an example, I would like to mention a room for all female students over all academic years in the program of applied computer science. Unfortunately, we have only around 10-15 % female students in our courses, sometimes only 1 or 2 female students in a course group. The virtual room makes it possible to enforce relevant interaction and support among those female students in a group that summed up is around 10-15 women. I could imagine that this is also good for creating similar homogenous subgroups of any kind reaching a critical mass for minority groups. On the other hand, conversely, other rooms can be used to mix up.