Internationalization at home through Virtual Exchange

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the higher education landscape for higher education institutions (HEIs) in many ways. In early 2020, teaching and learning across the globe pivoted to what has been called “‘emergency remote education,”’ a rapid response to a crisis. Many study abroad programs were cancelled and in order to ensure continuity of access to education for domestic students, universities experimented with various forms of online and blended education as access to campuses was interrupted for short periods or ceased all together for extended periods. Emergency solutions are very different to planned online learning experiences, and their impact and effectiveness isare only beginning to be explored. Social injustice, inequities and the digital divide have come to light as they have been further exacerbated in the pandemic and need targeted measures (Bozkurt et al. 2020). However, the role of technology in the rapid response to the crisis has undoubtedly led universities to seriously rethink the role it can play in higher education, and also its potential role in internationalization. Until recently online education and internationalization had not been closely linked, nor were they seen as offering added value to one another (de Wit, 2016; Helm, 2020). Yet one of the repercussions of the pandemic may be a reconsideration of how online learning can support a more inclusive, open, and sustainable education (Bozkurt et al., 2020; Czerniewicz et al., 2020), and an approach to internationalization of teaching and learning where transnational collaboration is based on an ethos of reciprocity and mutual exchange. Well before the COVID-19 crisis, the motivations and ethics of universities’ drive for internationaliszation were being called into question. Issues were being raised about the commodification and neoliberalization of higher education, the ecological sustainability of student and staff mobility and the “perpetuation of Western epistemological and ontological authority”. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the main features of virtual exchange and different models before looking at impact studies of large- scale VE initiatives. This is followed by a consideration of the opportunities virtual exchange offers for internationalization as well as the risks. Questions designed tfor reflection on for the development of an institutional VE strategy are presented before the final concluding remarks. The chapter is written by authors whose locus of enunciation is Europe and the United States, but the text boxes about virtual exchangeVE initiatives are written by authors in Brazil, India, and South Africa in an effort to expand the international perspectives