Purpose

Allowing for interaction with foreign cultures without the need to travel, intercultural virtual collaboration represents a potential tool to develop business students’ intercultural competence. This study aims to explore students’ perceptions towards the implementation of a research-based task sequence in a project in which undergraduate Business students from Spain collaborated virtually with undergraduate business students from The Netherlands during a semester. More specifically, this paper investigates what intercultural competence indicators were mostly developed by the sequence implemented; how much each task from the sequence in question developed different intercultural competence indicators; and how much students enjoyed participating in each task.

Design/methodology/approach

Data was collected through after-task reflection questionnaires. A quantitative analysis of Likert-type questions was carried out and open-ended responses were used to illustrate findings.

Findings

Results reveal that the task sequence developed different dimensions of students’ intercultural competence and, particularly, fostered a positive attitude towards intercultural relationships, increased students’ cultural knowledge and awareness and equipped students with skills to work in diverse teams. It also showed that as complexity grew along the sequence, the average students’ perception of their intercultural competence development tended to decrease. The majority of students’ very much liked participating in the different tasks.

Originality/value

Designing telecollaborative projects can be very challenging and understanding the learning potential of different pedagogical strategies for virtual collaborative environments can help teachers to take better-informed decisions.

中文翻译：

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通过跨文化虚拟协作培养商科学生的跨文化能力：任务序列实施

目的

允许在不需要旅行的情况下与外国文化互动，跨文化虚拟协作代表了培养商科学生跨文化能力的潜在工具。本研究旨在探讨学生对在一个项目中实施基于研究的任务序列的看法，在该项目中，来自西班牙的商科学生在一个学期内与来自荷兰的本科商科学生进行虚拟合作。更具体地说，本文调查了哪些跨文化能力指标主要是由实施的序列制定的；相关序列中的每项任务在多大程度上发展了不同的跨文化能力指标；以及学生有多喜欢参与每项任务。

设计/方法/方法

数据是通过任务后反思问卷收集的。对李克特类型的问题进行了定量分析，并使用开放式回答来说明调查结果。

发现

结果表明，任务序列开发了学生跨文化能力的不同维度，特别是培养了对跨文化关系的积极态度，增加了学生的文化知识和意识，并为学生提供了在不同团队中工作的技能。它还表明，随着复杂性的增加，平均学生对跨文化能力发展的感知趋于下降。大多数学生非常喜欢参与不同的任务。

原创性/价值

设计远程协作项目可能非常具有挑战性，了解虚拟协作环境的不同教学策略的学习潜力可以帮助教师做出更明智的决定。