ABSTRACT

As physical mobility finds itself impeded by the COVID-19 crisis, the world witnesses the potential of technology for connecting students who are physically distanced inside and cross-borders. In such scenarios, telecollaboration and virtual exchange have gained increased attention as powerful pedagogical strategies to allow for the continuity of intercultural exchanges and understanding the trends of this growing field can be of high significance to practitioners when planning future related initiatives. Although telecollaboration and virtual exchange are not new phenomena, to the best of our knowledge, a thorough bibliometric study of the area, considering the characteristics of its publications and its scientific community, has not yet been developed. This study carried out a bibliometric analysis of the telecollaboration and virtual exchange research field using a set of 254 articles from the Web of Science and Scopus databases with the objective of characterising the area as well as identifying research tendencies. In particular, this study uses four analytical scientometric tools: co-citation, co-authorship, keywords co-occurrence analysis and identification of research trends. This study identified emerging and declining themes in the field of telecollaboration and virtual exchange, confirming that the practice is increasingly adopting diverse formats and cutting across different knowledge fields. In addition, results showed that international collaboration so far involves few countries and there is much space to widen co-authorship networks to enhance intercultural exchanges. The review also explores the benefits and drawbacks of the technological tools adopted in the studies from our sample database.

摘要

由于身体机动性受到 COVID-19 危机的阻碍，世界见证了技术的潜力，可以将在国内和跨境物理距离遥远的学生联系起来。在这种情况下，远程协作和虚拟交流作为强大的教学策略获得了越来越多的关注，以允许跨文化交流的连续性，并且了解这一不断发展的领域的趋势对于从业者规划未来相关举措时具有重要意义。尽管远程协作和虚拟交流不是新现象，但据我们所知，考虑到其出版物和科学界的特点，尚未对该领域进行全面的文献计量学研究。本研究使用 Web of Science 和 Scopus 数据库中的一组 254 篇文章对远程协作和虚拟交换研究领域进行了文献计量分析，目的是描述该领域的特征并确定研究趋势。特别是，本研究使用了四种科学计量分析工具：共同引用、共同作者、关键词共现分析和研究趋势识别。这项研究确定了远程协作和虚拟交流领域中新兴和衰落的主题，证实了这种做法越来越多地采用多样化的形式并跨越不同的知识领域。此外，结果表明，到目前为止，国际合作涉及的国家很少，而且在扩大共同作者网络以加强跨文化交流方面还有很大空间。