The i-DOT project originated at Artevelde University of Applied Sciences in Ghent, Belgium, in 2018, and grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the sudden adoption of information and communication technology in higher education opened the door to nine collaborating institutions. The format is deliberately lightweight: over roughly one month, students participate in two to three discussion sessions on occupational therapy topics such as occupational deprivation and disruption among older adults. They share societal and professional perspectives from their home countries with peers abroad and with international organizations, coordinating their virtual exchanges independently. Crucially, each institution retains full autonomy, deciding whether participation is compulsory or voluntary, whether academic output is required, and whether students are assessed, while shared resources such as guiding questions keep the experience coherent across groups.

The study employed a convergent mixed-methods design, collecting quantitative and qualitative data in parallel and merging them for comparison. In the quantitative phase, 139 occupational therapy students completed a 54-question electronic survey, translated into English and German and piloted with 13 participants from six countries, yielding a response rate of 69.5 percent. The survey covered demographics, general experience, academic and professional development, personal and social development, cultural awareness, and overall experience, using Likert scales, single- and multiple-response formats, and open-ended questions. In the qualitative phase, three student focus groups involving ten students, one focus group with three educators, and two individual educator interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed by at least three researchers each using an adapted hybrid thematic analysis based on Braun and Clarke’s six-step coding process.

The headline result is unambiguous: 77.7 percent of surveyed students agreed they benefited from the project. The largest gains appeared in social and interpersonal skills, followed closely by accelerated professional development. Most strikingly, 75.54 percent of participants believed their learning experience was richer than it would have been had they interacted only with peers from their own country. Students reported discovering entirely new practice domains, with one participant from Croatia marveling that school-based occupational therapy, absent in her home country, was ‘a whole new level of excitement’ to learn about. Others compared degree structures, classroom practices, and intervention strategies across borders, gaining a comparative understanding of their own profession that no domestic curriculum could easily replicate.

The project also appeared to shape professional identity. Some 67.63 percent of students agreed they developed their identity as future occupational therapists, and 79.85 percent were convinced the skills learned would benefit them in future working environments. Participants described deepened awareness of diversity that extended well beyond nationality, encompassing lifestyle, cultural, political, and religious differences, with one student noting that comparing cultures, religions, and practices became ‘the highlight of all of our discussions.’ The researchers argue this exposure helps students conceptualize occupation in the context of culture and occupational justice, capabilities aligned with the World Federation of Occupational Therapists’ minimum standards, which call for curricula grounded in local contexts but informed by global perspectives.

Personal and social growth was equally prominent. Most students, 83.45 percent, felt more confident communicating with new people, 81.29 percent reported improved active listening, and 66.19 percent described themselves as more confident overall. Communication skills were cited by 91.37 percent of participants, and organizational skills by 54.68 percent. The qualitative data added texture: students spoke of stepping out of their comfort zones, connecting on a deeper level, helping each other with assignments, and maintaining friendships long after the project ended. One participant described her i-DOT partners as her first two friends outside her own country, a detail that captures the human dimension behind the statistics.

Participation was not without friction. The study identified two broad categories of challenges: logistical and participant-related. Logistical barriers included busy academic schedules, cited by 43.17 percent of students, poor internet connectivity at 39.57 percent, technological difficulties at 25.18 percent, different time zones at 13.67 percent, and loadshedding by a national power utility at 7.19 percent. Yet the qualitative findings complicated the picture: students found time zones easier to navigate than anticipated and laughed off connection problems rather than letting them derail discussions. Language posed the greatest participant-related challenge, since the project ran in English, which was not a first or second language for some students, but only 43.88 percent reported it as a difficulty. One educator observed that students feared the language barrier most before starting, only to realize during interviews that it was far less of a problem than anticipated.

The study also illuminated what made participation work. Student-led facilitators included planning ahead, using tactics to boost communication, and deploying translation software, with one student describing how partners would pause meetings to consult Google Translate. Digital tools and virtual platforms created what participants called a safe setting, a less confrontational environment in which, as one put it, the screen between them allowed freer speech. The freedom to use multiple platforms helped too: some groups moved to WhatsApp voice messages, finding it easier to record speech than to type in a second language. Notably, 90.69 percent of students agreed they had sufficient technological skills, likely a legacy of pandemic-era ICT adoption, and 45.32 percent said they were internally motivated to participate despite receiving no academic marks. Statistical testing found motivation was not associated with grading, suggesting the experience carried intrinsic value.

Structural features of the project mattered as well. Educators reported that providing guiding questions in advance helped students plan, prepare, and feel engaged, while preparation led by educators, peer mentorship from former participants, and the project’s manageable one-month duration with just two to three discussions all supported engagement. Contrary to earlier research suggesting that mixing students from different academic years hampers interaction, only 2.2 percent of participants in this study cited year of study as a negative factor, and for most it functioned as an enabler. Students recommended greater engagement with educators during and after the project and better alignment of preparatory activities across institutions, offering a practical roadmap for future iterations.

The implications extend well beyond occupational therapy. The authors argue that short-term online collaborative learning engagements of just two to three hours can yield substantial outcomes, making such initiatives feasible within existing curricula across disciplines. By removing financial and travel barriers, the online format promotes equity, allowing students to access international experiences and practice areas unavailable in their home countries, which in turn contributes to professional identity formation and advocacy potential. As health systems worldwide grapple with increasingly diverse populations and a growing demand for culturally competent clinicians, the i-DOT model offers a flexible, low-cost template: preserve institutional autonomy, standardize only what is necessary, trust students to coordinate their own exchanges, and let a month of honest cross-cultural conversation do the rest. The study’s authors acknowledge limitations, including unequal representation across countries and the possibility that participants were inherently motivated, and they recommend pretest-posttest designs in future research. Even so, the evidence points to a compelling conclusion: transformative international education can now happen at home, one virtual discussion at a time.

Subject of Research: International online collaborative learning and its benefits and barriers for occupational therapy students

Article Title: An international online collaborative learning project for occupational therapy students: A mixed-methods study

Article References: An international online collaborative learning project for occupational therapy students: A mixed-methods study. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1080/11038128.2025.2599034

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1080/11038128.2025.2599034

Keywords: occupational therapy, online collaborative learning, internationalization at home, health education, virtual exchange, cultural awareness, professional identity, higher education, mixed methods, student engagement, intercultural learning, i-DOT project

The methodology behind the intervention, known as Collaborative Online International Learning, or COIL, originated at the State University of New York, which established its COIL Center in 2004 to give students opportunities to develop intercultural skills through international online interaction. Unlike a traditional exchange, COIL does not require students to travel. Instead, it embeds a shared academic project into existing courses, so that two classes in different countries jointly produce a common deliverable. Because it operates entirely within the curriculum, it is often described as a form of internationalisation at home, bringing global contact to students who might never afford or attempt physical mobility.

In the Spanish-Costa Rican experience, the seven weeks were tightly structured. In the first week, participants created short introductory videos on Padlet, sharing their personal profiles, interests and motivations. In the second week, mixed teams of up to five students, with a maximum of three from UNED and two from Granada, formed themselves based on the interests revealed in the icebreaker activity. From weeks three to six, the teams collaborated on designing a Primary Education learning situation that used 3D printing as a teaching resource, communicating through a Moodle forum and instant messaging tools such as WhatsApp and Telegram. The final week was devoted to submitting the finished learning situation in PDF and audiovisual formats to a shared Padlet wall and to completing a reflective closing exercise alongside the posttest questionnaire.

Measuring intercultural competence is notoriously difficult because the construct spans cognition, affect and behaviour. The research team therefore triangulated three validated instruments. Intercultural sensitivity was assessed with the 16-item Intercultural Sensitivity Scale, covering respect for cultural differences, interaction attentiveness and interaction confidence. Cultural intelligence was measured with the 20-item Cultural Intelligence Scale, spanning metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioural dimensions. Multicultural personality was evaluated with the abbreviated Multicultural Personality Questionnaire, which captures cultural empathy, social initiative, open-mindedness, emotional stability and flexibility. All three scales have validated Spanish versions, and internal consistency coefficients in this study ranged from 0.737 to 0.912, indicating acceptable to excellent reliability. Data were collected before the intervention on 18 September 2025 and after it on 17 November 2025.

Because the score distributions deviated from normality, the researchers relied on non-parametric statistics. Within-group pre-post changes were tested with the Wilcoxon signed-ranks test, and between-university differences with the Mann-Whitney U test, with effect sizes estimated using Cliff’s delta and the Vargha and Delaney A statistic. Crucially, the team applied the Benjamini-Hochberg False Discovery Rate correction to control the inflated risk of false positives that arises when many comparisons are performed. This methodological rigour mattered: after correction, only a subset of dimensions retained both statistical significance and at least small effect sizes, namely interaction confidence, cognitive cultural intelligence, social initiative and open-mindedness. The remaining statistically visible changes shrank to trivial practical magnitude once multiple comparisons were accounted for.

The gains that survived scrutiny were concentrated in interactional and cognitive-dispositional territory. Interaction confidence rose across the whole sample from a mean of 3.89 to 4.18 on a five-point scale, with a stronger increase at UNED, where scores climbed from 3.87 to 4.24. Cognitive cultural intelligence, which reflects explicit knowledge about cultures, increased from 3.32 to 3.67 overall, and most dramatically at UNED, where the mean jumped from 3.04 to 3.60. Social initiative rose from 3.86 to 4.16 and open-mindedness from 4.04 to 4.24, with both institutions showing parallel gains. These are exactly the components one would expect a short, project-based collaboration to strengthen: students gained concrete knowledge about another culture, grew more willing to initiate contact, and became more confident interacting across cultural boundaries.

The most provocative finding was a decline in respect for cultural differences and enjoyment of interaction, particularly at the University of Granada, where the mean fell from 1.41 to 1.31, while the dimension stayed essentially flat at UNED. Rather than reading this as a failure of the intervention, the authors interpret it through theoretical models of intercultural sensitivity development, which describe non-linear and sometimes regressive phases during initial significant intercultural contact. Ethnorelative frameworks suggest that early exposure to diversity can shatter idealised perceptions and provoke a more demanding, more realistic appraisal of cultural complexity. In other words, students may have become more culturally realistic, recognising that difference is genuinely challenging rather than superficially charming. The researchers caution, however, that alternative explanations cannot be excluded and that longitudinal work is needed to confirm this interpretation.

The comparative analysis between the two institutions added another layer of interest. Before the intervention, Granada students scored significantly higher on metacognitive cultural intelligence, while UNED students started higher on cognitive cultural intelligence. After the seven weeks, the cognitive gap between the universities was reduced to statistical and practical insignificance, a pattern the authors describe as a possible equalising effect of the COIL experience. The metacognitive advantage for Granada persisted, although its magnitude shrank from medium to small. This suggests that international collaborative work can help homogenise certain components of intercultural competence across very different educational contexts, but that deeply rooted metacognitive dispositions, shaped by prior curricular and structural factors, resist short-term correction. A posttest difference in open-mindedness favouring UNED also emerged, with a small effect size.

The study is candid about its limits. The absence of a control group means maturation effects or concurrent learning experiences cannot be ruled out as alternative causes of the observed changes. Participation was voluntary and self-selected, potentially biasing the sample toward students already inclined toward intercultural engagement, which may inflate the apparent impact. The sample, drawn from Primary Education and General Basic Education programmes and comprising 48 men and 159 women aged 18 to 60, was obtained through convenience sampling. The authors also note that they did not formally test measurement invariance of the three instruments across the two institutions, a caveat for cross-institutional comparisons, and they flag the seven-week duration as structurally insufficient for developing stable affective traits such as cultural empathy, emotional stability and flexibility, which showed only trivial changes.

The practical implications are clear. The findings argue for COIL designs of greater duration and structural intentionality, combining collaborative tasks with explicit affective training, structured reflection and pedagogical scaffolding aimed at the dimensions least amenable to short-term change. They also argue for a more honest public conversation about virtual exchange, one that resists celebrating statistical significance alone and instead asks what actually changed, by how much, and for whom. As universities worldwide search for scalable alternatives to physical mobility, this Spanish-Costa Rican experiment offers both encouragement and a warning: online international collaboration can genuinely move the needle on confidence, cultural knowledge and openness, but respect, empathy and emotional stability demand longer, deeper and more deliberately designed encounters.

Subject of Research: Development of intercultural competence in pre-service teachers through a COIL virtual exchange between Spanish and Costa Rican universities.

Article Title: Intercultural competence in teacher training: a COIL virtual exchange between Spain and Costa Rica universities

Article References: Romero-Rodríguez, J.-M., López-Gamboa, J.-E., Aguilera-Jinesta, R., & Victoria-Maldonado, J.-J. (2026). Intercultural competence in teacher training: a COIL virtual exchange between Spain and Costa Rica universities. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00073-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00073-0

Keywords: COIL, virtual exchange, intercultural competence, teacher training, pre-service teachers, cultural intelligence, intercultural sensitivity, multicultural personality, University of Granada, UNED Costa Rica, internationalisation at home, 3D printing in education