J. (Juan) Alba Duran, MA

2022-2024
Trainer at Virtual International Collaboration in Higher Education (OCW funded project)

With Virtual International Collaboration Projects (VIS), universities give their students the opportunity to gain international experience.

With the subsidy from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, lecturers and educationalists can set up or improve VIS projects. Besides financial support through the grant, support is also offered in the form of advice and training.

2018-2020
EVOLVE
Teacher and Researcher

This project aims to mainstream Virtual Exchange (VE) as an innovative form of collaborative international learning across disciplines in Higher Education (HE) institutions in Europe and beyond.

VE is a form of computer-mediated learning whereby students from geographically remote classes work together online (in pairs or small groups) on learning tasks developed by teachers or educational facilitators (for a full description, see What is Virtual Exchange).

EVOLVE will promote the awareness and implementation of VE by:

• Implementing online collaborative training and accreditation for educators to support their continuous professional development;
• Conducting state-of-the art research to measure impact at student, educator and institution level to educators,  policy and decision makers in HE;
• Engaging with policy and decision makers at institutional, national and European level to demonstrate good practices of VE and present research results demonstrating its impact at student, educator and institution level.
  

2018-2019
UFRUG Online Intercultural Exchange
Task developer and supervisor.

This project, within the umbrella project ENVOIE (UG), brought together 1st year BA students of Journalism (Chile) and 2nd year BA students of European Languages and cultures (The Netherlands). During eight weeks, the students of both universities worked online and autonomously, using digital communication tools for collaborative editing of journalistic texts. The final product was a joint intercultural magazine with articles reflecting on contemporary cultural issues. 

2013-2017
RUG-UB Online Intercultural Exchange
Task developer and supervisor.

This telecollaboration project was succesfully implemented during 4 academic years between 2nd year students of Spanish from the degree of European Languages and Cultures (UG) and students from the Master of Teaching Spanish as a Second Language (MFPELE) from the University of Barcelona (UB).