Sessions

The IVE Project: Supplementing Intercultural Awareness with the Student-Generated Survey

The International Virtual Exchange Project (IVEProject) (https://iveproject.org/) offers two eight-week exchanges each year affording EFL students the opportunity to interact with peers from other countries. In 2020 over 6000 tertiary-level students from twelve countries joined. This presentation will focus on a supplemental activity, the Student-Generated Survey (SGS), from creation and implementation to classroom application. The SGS aims to increase student engagement by allowing them to submit questions to all participants. Approximately fifteen questions are selected to create the SGS which are made available to participants. The large number of responses (over 1500 in the spring exchange), separated by countries, offers students a unique opportunity to discuss and reflect upon the similarities and differences of their international peers. This presentation will outline qualitative and quantitative data regarding student perceptions of the activity. Students reported that results from this activity helped them understand they had more similarities with their international counterparts than they expected. It was also found that student use of the SGS results differed by country. The IVEProject is maintained with financial assistance from a Japanese government Kaken grant and is therefore free-of-charge.