Leiden exchange for virtual exchanges: 'We want to deliver ecologically aware global citizens'
Professor Dario Fazzi has been organising virtual exchanges for students with various American universities for a number of years. Now he has been awarded a grant from the Erasmus+ programme to further develop the virtual component of his teaching.
'In recent years we have used several grants to set up cooperation between Dutch students and various American universities,' Fazzi says. 'During virtual exchanges, Dutch students worked with students in the United States on projects about ecological degradation and the reactions to it from local communities and authorities.'
The students modelled their results in Google Maps. 'They looked for the ecologically vulnerable places and wrote content about them,' Fazzi says. 'When they then presented it online, we realised that they had actually made short clips about these places. So the idea arose to actually film some of these places and combine them with the student content to produce an interactive video, which we used to create an immersive learning experience.' Students use VR glasses in such lectures, for example, to immerse themselves in the material.
Consortium
A grant from the Erasmus+ programme is now making it possible to expand this approach. In cooperation with the Dutch Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, the Belgian organisation Media and Learning Association and universities in Madrid, Helsinki and Bologna, Fazzi will design an Education for Sustainable Development programme in which European students can collaborate with American students. 'We used the Una Europa network that Leiden is already part of,' Fazzi says. 'We’ll start in January with a series of training courses for the staff involved to learn how to better handle virtual exchanges and the use of virtual reality in higher education. Then we hope to start running the first pilots in the autumn, where students will work with universities on the East Coast of the States.'
Transferable skills
Fazzi hopes that this will introduce even more students to ecological democracy. 'I would like students to learn that sound ecological politics, the availability of appropriate ecological information and the protection of ecological rights begin at the local level, but can have global effects,' Fazzi says. 'Virtual exchange is a useful tool for this, which can easily be incorporated into existing lectures. We mainly use everyday, user-friendly systems like Google Maps. As a result, students get involved quickly and develop transferable skills, such as intercultural communication.