Online Global Experiences: International Collaboration During a Pandemic

Global experiences are offered by universities internationally and provide university students with myriad educational and intercultural skills. When international travel and traditional global experiences were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, universities needed to find new ways to provide students with global experiences that could be undertaken from home. This article reports on the collaborative online global experiences undertaken between university staff and students from Melbourne, Australia and Kochi, Japan. It offers reflections from the authors who played key facilitator roles in each context using Kolb’s Learning Cycle (Kolb, 1984) as a theoretical model for reflective practice. The ‘Standards of Good Practice for Education Abroad’ (The Forum on Education Abroad, 2020) are used as a principled model for our reflections on the online global experiences. The discussion focuses on online techniques with English language learners and highlights the transformational learning that can be achieved through online global experiences. The article concludes with implications and applications for future global experiences