Virtual Exchange for Future Teachers: A Project-based Learning Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Virtual Exchange (VE) has received more attention recently, due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. Although VE is not new (O’Dowd, 2020), its home is usually in second language programs, rather than education faculties where the focus is less on language learning and more on expanding pedagogical content knowledge (Rets et al., 2020). However, instructors of pre-service teachers still see a need to support language learning while designing for learning around second language teaching (Tedick & Lyster, 2020). During Feb. - Mar. 2021, future language teachers from Spain and Canada took part in a VE that provided experiential learning about second language pedagogy in different cultural contexts while working on improving their Spanish and English respectively. Students in Canada studying to become Spanish as Foreign Language teachers were partnered with students in Spain who were becoming English as Foreign Language teachers. Embedded in a course in both countries, student partners met during an overlapping portion of their respective semesters, both synchronously and asynchronously through a combined course shell. A bilingual TA was hired to support the VE and students had language practice, as the Zoom sessions alternated between using Spanish and English. The design for the courses were built around project-based learning (Stoller, 2006) all modelled around a Choiceboard. Project-based learning allowed students to follow their interests through choices in how to demonstrate their learning in the form of final products. Classwork and partner projects resulted in a meaningful global learning experience. The VE projects involved researching and sharing specific topics of L2 pedagogy and language use (e.g., common teaching approaches; the role of other languages in the classroom; dialect awareness), including one multi-modal assignment. As a result, this VE addressed an ongoing goal of internationalizing this introductory teaching specialization course. The VE also provided intercultural communication and language practice for the students and a design partnership among the Canadian instructor and TA with the Spanish partner instructors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".