Students who have completed a semester abroad in the Bachelor of International studies present a pre-departure information session for other students. This can be in-person or online.
Each student gives a presentation of about 6-8 minutes, supported by a PowerPoint (or similar), and responds to 3-4 questions from the floor. Students should refer to their specific experience, and those of their cohort, to provide precise, useful advice to their peers. They should pick a specific topic, which should be announced in the introduction to the presentation.
Example topics include:
- How did you manage working in a different academic system?
- What did you learn from negotiating the differences?
- Were they any challenges and how did you overcome them?
- What advice would you give to other students considering participating in a student exchange in the host country?
- Share your intercultural insights.
- What skills and/or attributes that you have developed during your exchange experience have contributed to your personal and professional development?
Details
- CLASS SIZE
- 20-40, 40-60
- CLASS LEVEL
- Third year
- ASSESSMENT SECURITY
- High security
- TIME REQUIREMENTS
- Medium time
- CONDITIONS
- Identity verified
- FEATURES
- Authentic
Advantages
Presenters have the opportunity to contribute to the study abroad preparation of their peers; to position themselves as experts; to reflect on their experiences in productive ways; to have practice in articulating their reflections to a non-specialist audience. This is an authentic assessment item in which there is a purpose to the task beyond its status as assessment.
Challenges
Recruiting an audience and timetabling. In the first iteration of the course, with 6 students, it was possible to run the entire session within our timetabled class slot, and to draw a sizeable audience, recruited through the support of colleagues, SLC engagement staff, International Relations staff and IGET. For the second iteration of the course, with an enrolment of 20, three different sessions were necessary. This gave it less the buzz of an "event", the audience was smaller, and was dispersed across the three sessions: attendance was, frankly, discouraging.
I find it impossible to mark "live" while also chairing, and so need to rewatch recordings.
Tips for implementation
Get the dates set early and publicize them! If possible, get a second marker who can attend the sessions and support marking live.
As part of the publicity, distribute a link to a live program (editable Googledoc) to which presenters can add the name of their presentation.
Learning outcomes
- Engage in reflective processes for understanding and evaluating intercultural experiences and challenges
- Apply problem-solving and critical thinking skills in intercultural contexts
- Articulate and communicate intercultural understandings effectively in a variety of genres
- Demonstrate the ability to communicate results of reflection to a non-specialist audience
How it supports academic integrity
The assessment description includes the wording: This task has been designed to be challenging, authentic and complex. Whilst students may use AI technologies, successful completion of assessment in this course will require students to critically engage in specific contexts and tasks for which artificial intelligence will provide only limited support and guidance.
Since students are asked to draw on their own experiences to provide concrete advice and since they answer questions from the floor, there is little motivation to use generative AI for the detail of the work. AI could be used to provide an outline of the presentation, and general advice - but in my experience, students are extremely eager to talk about their time overseas and to do this to the benefit of their peers. They are positioned as experts through the nature of the topic, and banalities about destinations are not rewarded through the criteria.
Dr Barbara Hanna
uqbhanna@uq.edu.au
The continuing interest underpinning my research is that of the self-presentation of the non-native speaker, in different genres. This has led me to work on: culturally determined practices; cross-cultural comparisons; and on intercultural behaviour, how this is conceptualized and how, in practice, encounters between different expectations of appropriate behaviour play out.
One focus of my attention has been the proliferation of new intercultural encounters which are made possible by online technologies. In particular, Juliana de Nooy and I undertook a project examining discussion fora on media websites, culminating in our 2009 book. The pedagogical implications of this work, and my own teaching practices have allowed me to develop expertise in language learning and technology which I have extended through other collaborations (e.g. Cowley & Hanna, 2013 on Wikipedia) research supervisions and publications which derive from it (Gao & Hanna, 2016, on instructional software; work with Khosravi, Gyamfit et al; and a forthcoming paper with Aljohani). Find out more