University Student Perceptions of Transversal Competence Development in Virtual Exchange

Introduction

In the highly connected 21^st century, the workforce needs to have the necessary skills and competences to effectively engage with situations and transactions that are technology-mediated and to adapt to them quickly. If the need to promote competences in future professionals as an answer to the demands of the labour market had already been emphasised by the European Commission (2007), this became more evident with the COVID-19 pandemic, when not only teachers and students but citizens in general, were forced to move from face-to-face to online working environments. These essential competences (i.e., digital, foreign language, learning to learn, entrepreneurial, civic, social and intercultural competences), also known as transversal or key competences due to their transferability, are described as a combination of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that are necessary for personal and professional development, as well as for social inclusion and active citizenship. Forward-looking decisions on the part of educational institutions to integrate and assess the development of these competences as part of the curriculum while students are still in education and training are now more necessary than ever, and special emphasis should be placed on enhancing those competences required for effective collaboration and communication in online environments.

In line with the above considerations, the main objective of this chapter is to investigate whether virtual exchange (VE), an innovative pedagogy that entails engaging students from different institutional contexts and backgrounds in online intercultural interaction, can encourage transversal competence development of students in Higher Education. The research questions that guided this investigation are the following:

• RQ1. What are the students’ perceptions of transversal competence development after participating in an intercultural virtual exchange?

• RQ2. In their opinion, what are the most developed competences, if any?

In order to find answers to these questions, a VE was organised to engage undergraduate students from a university in Spain and a university in the United States.