Virtual exchange projects are seen as essential parts of international education, as they are student-centred, develop students’ cooperation and communication skills with speakers of other languages and they can promote intercultural competence (Dooly, 2017). Another affordance of such projects is that while study abroad programmes and exchange trips are not always available to students due to financial reasons, such telecollaboration projects may fill the gap by “provid[ing] something of the ‘in-country’ experience” (Lázár, 2015, p. 208). Kaçar and Fekete (2021) investigated the ways a virtual exchange project between Hungarian and Turkish university students can develop learners’ techno-pedagogical knowledge and intercultural competence. They involved 28 Turkish and 18 Hungarian pre-service EFL teachers in their joint technology-inclusive methodology course. In the first phase, they paired the students and assigned them activities to get to know each other better. In the second phase, the students had to design a 20-minute-long task-based ICT-inclusive EFL classroom activity for B1 learners on cultural issues, using a lesson plan template; then, they had to upload their lesson plans into a Google Drive folder, where the other students commented on their work. In the same phase, all the participants took part in two ninety-minute-long Zoom facilitated workshops about intercultural communication and digital cooperation. In the third phase of the project, the students had to compile their portfolios, including their lesson plans and reflections. The participants found that the collaborative knowledge construction and the virtual community of practice they participated in developed their critical thinking and reflective skills and “equipped them with the characteristics of 21st century teachers” (p. 450). Even though the COVID-19 pandemic prevented them from engaging in the experiential learning opportunity of implementing the lesson plans created in class, the teacher trainees expressed their satisfaction with the project: they felt that the workshops contributed to raising their intercultural sensitivity; however, they would have preferred to communicate more with their project partners, the students from the other university.

Lázár’s (2015) study also highlights that international web collaboration projects can be regarded as useful (and cost-efficient) tools for students’ intercultural competence development. The project she reported on involved four groups of students, 78 learners all in all from four countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey). The learners had one lesson a week to work on the project at school, with the help of their local teachers and they were also grouped into four international classes of roughly 20 students guided by one of the four participating teachers. The teaching materials, including texts, pictures, videos, and tasks were all uploaded to Moodle, and the students also used this platform to contribute to forum discussions, wikis, and upload their journals and assignments. The students had to work in small mixed nationality groups and deal with various topics, such as presenting their hometown, discussing their typical meals and table manners in their countries, selecting, and presenting popular songs from their countries and writing a newsletter for students participating in similar projects. At the beginning of the project, the students’ knowledge about their own and other cultures “seemed fairly superficial” (p. 212); for instance, in the activity where they needed to present their hometowns, some students refrained from expressing their thoughts and some expressed ethnocentric views and cultural superiority. The students needed time and more guidance, and eventually, more than two months into the project, “the first real interaction appeared in a forum” (p. 215), which the teachers identified as the sign of developing skills of discovery and online interaction. Despite the initial difficulties, the students also realized that they were learning from working with other students and the project was useful for them, and they participated in further activities with more involvement. The project enabled the learners to learn more about their own culture and they learned about what roles an individual’s cultural background may play in forming their values, beliefs, and behaviours. The participating teachers concluded that “giving learners the possibility to meet other learners living elsewhere in the world was a unique learning experience that developed the learners’ skills of observation and discovery as well as their attitudes of openness and acceptance” (Lázár, 2015, p. 219).

Even though these projects are dissimilar in scope and design, some conclusions can be drawn from them. First, it seems feasible to include experiential learning activities in normal EFL classes, and students do not seem to mind that in such cases, the classes move beyond the physical boundaries of the classroom; quite conversely, these projects seem to engage them. Also, by participating in similar experiential learning activities, the participants can learn a lot about the world, broaden their horizons and learn to become more open-minded and respectful towards others. If the teacher adds a global dimension to these projects by choosing a topic of local, global, or intercultural significance, the students can try out what they have learnt in class in a meaningful, real, authentic context. By engaging in intercultural web collaboration or virtual exchange projects, they learn how to communicate with people from different cultural backgrounds, respect their differences and thus they become intercultural speakers and hopefully global citizens as well.