Gail Morong & Donna DesBiens (2016) Culturally responsive online design: learning at intercultural intersections, Intercultural Education, 27:5, 474-492, DOI: 10.1080/14675986.2016.1240901

This article presents evidence-based guidelines to inform culturally responsive online learning design in higher education. The guidelines present a base for online design methodology to support intercultural learning and enable formative evaluation of pedagogy, learning activity and assessment applications.

This chapter describes the development and implementation of a fully online intercultural communication course that aims to propel students to a higher level of intercultural competence and engagement while they are participating in an international exchange program.

Macfadyen, L. P., Chase, M., Reeder, K., & Roche, J. (2003). Matches and Mismatches in Intercultural Learning: Designing and Moderating an Online Intercultural Course. UBC Community and Partner Publications. C, . Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/ubccommunityandpartnerspublicati/52387/items/1.0058422

This paper explores communicative trends in an online, facilitated course for intercultural learners. The authors examined participation rates and communicative interactivity between culturally diverse learners, and find that participation rates differ by cultural grouping, by gender and by role, and that online interactions are dominated by facilitator- learner exchanges (rather than by peer-to-peer communications). 

This article, written by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento for NPR, looks at how teens and young adults—Generation Z—are handling lockdowns that have occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sarmiento interviewed young people from or living in South Korea, Italy, the United States, Spain, Mexico, and Chile.

This article describes the #Cinemadacasa initiative in Rome, in which images from a variety of films are projected onto buildings throughout the city every night. This initiative serves as a way to uplift citizens and pay homage to Rome's connection to the film industry. 

An episode of the NPR podcast Rough Translation features conversations with international correspondents about how culture is affecting responses to COVID-19. 

World leaders' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are largely dependent on national, regional, or local culture.

The BBC summarizes Queen Elizabeth II's message to the United Kingdom in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the exception of her annual Christmas Day message, the Queen rarely gives speeches, so this was considered a significant event and demonstrates the cultural influence of the monarchy in the United Kingdom. 

A video featured on The Guardian is a compilation of Italian mayors upset and yelling at constituents disobeying lockdown orders.

The National post featured a video of Sint Maarten Prime Minister Silveria E. Jacobs ordering citizens to buy 2-weeks worth of groceries in the event of a full lockdown and chastising anyone making excuses to disobey stay at home orders. She has been praised for her straight forward communication with citizens.

Since the pandemic was first declared, Jacinda Ardern has been hosting Facebook Live Q&As and communicating with her citizens in a calm and conversational tone. 

This article, written by Christian Anderson and Henrik Pryser Libell for The New York Times, highlights Finland's stockpile of medical supplies, which they have been building since the 1950s. Anderson and Libell say that the stockpile is a holdover from the Cold War era and also demonstrates a unique cultural value within the country. 

This visual story, composed by Mary Beth Sheridan for The Washington Post, demonstrates how countries across the world are promoting safety through PSAs about the coronavirus. The PSAs are tailored to cultural norms and traditions. Countries featured within the article include Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt, Iran, Senegal, Uganda, and Guatemala.

Faculty interested in or engaged in COIL can find resources here relevant to the development and assessment of intercultural competence in virtual international education.

This collection gathers together a variety of on-line instructional resources, most of them pre-existing courses, that support continued development of intercultural competence in a time of pandemic and study abroad cancellations. All resources have been "backwards-designed", e.g. they begin with specific learner outcome goals, most derived from the AAC&U intercultural knowledge and competence rubric, to advance through targeted intercultural exercises and reflective practice to guide the learner  towards intercultural and/or diversity-inclusion competence.

The evidence-based “Worldview Workshop Series” aims to increase openness to diversity and intercultural competence of faculty, staff, and administrators. Drawing from four phases of Vande Berg's (2009) transformational processes, the program contains topics on Cultural self-awareness, Awareness of others, Communication, Empathy, and Bridging cultural differences. The scores of pre- and post-test on participants’ openness to diversity were measured and compared, to examine the effect of the program on diversity awareness. Participants’ written reflections were also collected to gain rich data.

Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of the SUNY COIL center, and I recently (April 2, 2020) facilitated a webinar on Virtual Exchange for the Forum on Education Abroad's free "Response to COVID-19" series.  The video and slides are both permanently available free from the Forum website: www.forumea.org/webinars. This presentation gives a basic intro to virtual exchange, provides three models of virtual exchange along with examples of each, discusses the process of developing a VE, and links to a wealth of training opportunities and resources. 

One of the challenges of COIL is to support connection and relationships between participants. Like intercultural competence development, we can't count on it to happen on its own naturally without careful planning. I found the tips on fostering social presence and interaction on Brigham Young University's site helpful for the Virtual Exchange context. Starting with icebreakers to help learners get to know each other and continuing throughout the course with best practices in relationship development and maintenance, social presence should be a constant in COIL instructor course design!

Stephanie Dorscher at FIU has put together a useful resource page for faculty engaging in COIL or Virtual Exchange. She has posted sample activities, recommended strategies, sources of information, and more.

The AFS Global Competence Certificate and the GCC-at-home accomplish intercultural and inclusion-skills development through a series of engaging short animated videos, coupled with student discussion forums for deeper reflection, punctuated by guided group facilitation of learning at regular intervals.  Using the original GCC with short-term or semester-long study abroad has been shown to improve group intercultural competence by amounts ranging from one-half an intercultural development stage (8 points) to one full stage of development (15 points). Each is built to guide learners through Vande Berg's four phases of intercultural growth:

• Developing Self-Awareness
• Developing Other Awareness
• Developing Emotional Resilience around difference
• Building Bridging Skills

While it was originally designed for study abroad pre-departure courses, Anthony Ogden's YouTube Ethnography Project is easily adaptable to a COIL context. Here is what I would do: 

1. Put COIL students in diverse pairs or small groups. 

2. Have them complete Step 1, creating their own videos. Alternately, they could find existing videos that represent their own culture(s). 

3. Instead of framing their ethnographic research on YouTube as trying to under their host culture, have them search for and analyze videos related to the culture of their diverse teammates, including the videos those learners have already posted. 

4. Team members can serve as cultural informants for each other, responding to conclusions drawn in the ethnographies when they are presented to the group.

This activity is a fun way to engage the digital native generation in critical thinking. It could easily be done asynchronously in a virtual exchange or COIL setting - simply give the instructions, have learners complete the activity alone or in pairs and write reflections on their findings, and then debrief in a discussion board. The debriefing could occur in a synchronous discussion if you prefer. 

HubICL manager Annette Benson has created a very robust (nearly a hundred posts, last time I looked) collection of activities that translate well to virtual platforms. For those of you overwhelmed by the number of options in the HubICL toolbox or in need of guidance about what works/doesn't work online rather than in person, this is a great starting point to find appropriate tools. Don't forget to always align your choices with your intended learning outcomes! 

If you are looking for a self-contained program of study out there that you could send learners to or incorporate into a course or training program of your own, Katherine Yngve has some suggestions for you in a HubICL collection called Online Intercultural Learning Curriculum Options.

This video (which you can find in both the Links and Source section of this tool) explains the meaning of the terms: global citizenship, cosmopolitan and difference. It also discusses how difference matters in today's society and in their own lives. 

This article (which you can find in both the Links and Source section of this tool) defines white privilege and lists ways that people with white privilege can move beyond guilt or defensiveness and even use it in ways that benefit all people.