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Virtual Exchange (VE) is a form of experiential learning that relies heavily on learning-by-doing and reflection. The present study draws on visual data comprising students’ perceptions of critical learning incidents presented under an imaginary magnifying glass. To complete this project-closing reflective activity, the students had to describe a critical moment that they had experienced during VE and present it in a visual form. Data was collected longitudinally, in three projects (2019, 2020, and 2021) that followed the same pedagogical design and focused on the theme of tourism. The collaborating universities were from three countries: Poland, Finland, and the Netherlands. We used the methods of qualitative content analysis and social semiotic analysis to investigate the students’ reflections. The findings show that the most frequently expressed themes were related to participation in the first meeting, joint production, use of a foreign language, and adaptation to change. The study contributes to a better understanding of the role of multimodal reflection in VE.

Virtual exchange comprises online collaborative activities in facilitated, educational contexts across borders. This paper offers a multimodal approach to the study of social presence in students’ asynchronous online discourse in the context of virtual exchange. It draws on the Community of Inquiry model of online learning (Garrison 2017) and interprets social presence as the dynamic discursive process of social interaction and self-presentation. The data consists of screenshots collected in a closed Facebook group during the first assignment of a Czech-Finnish virtual exchange project in 2017. The study aims to explore how the method of multimodal discourse analysis can be used to describe the three dimensions of social presence. The students’ self-introductory posts, reactions and comments were examined in three modes of meaning-making: the linguistic, the visual and the action mode. The study offers a model for the qualitative multimodal discourse analysis of social presence construction in asynchronous social media interaction.

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Virtual Exchange is a collective term for a set of collaborative online learning practices that cut across institutional, cultural, and international borders. Moving outside their learning environments, the participants engage in project work with foreign peers. The teams have to work across time zones, use foreign languages, manage cultural differences and apply digital tools for communication and collaboration. The virtual projects enhance the development of transversal work/life skills, which are an asset in today’s global labour market. The aim of the present study is to explore the emotional trajectory of Virtual Exchange based on the students’ e-portfolios. By analysing the self-evaluations, we can get a better understanding of the emotional experience of participating in Virtual Exchange and use the findings to develop the pedagogical facilitation of such projects. The research questions address the emotions that the students described when they were reporting on their learning experiences and the individual emotional trajectories that emerge in the students’ reports. Data was collected in the form of e-portfolios that the student participants submitted at the end of a Finnish-Polish Virtual Exchange project in 2019. The “Combining Expertise from Linguistics and Tourism: A Tale of Two Cities Told in Videos” collaboration had promotional discourse in tourism as its main theme. The participants (N=25) were university students majoring in tourism (Poland) and in foreign language studies (Finland). The e-portfolios were analysed with the help of dialogical approach combined with discourse analytical insights (Sullivan, 2012).