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Students of initial teacher education need to be prepared for the classrooms of tomorrow. Teachers require the necessary skills and competences to teach in culturally diverse contexts, to collaborate across disciplines, and to use technologies in innovative ways; but the Digital Economy and Society Index reports that only 20-25% of students in Europe are taught by teachers who are confident using technology in the classroom, and only a small number of students of education are gaining intercultural experience by participating in international mobility programmes such as Erasmus+ (European Commission, 2015a). It is clear that institutions of initial teacher education need to find new ways to prepare their students for the challenges they will meet in the future. This report presents the findings of our study. However, not only do we provide here a large-scale study to demonstrate the impact of virtual exchange in an important field of university education, we also explore how policy makers and university management can take actions to make this methodology more widespread across university education and support students and teachers in its use. [To view the executive summary, "Executive Summary -- The Key Findings from The EVALUATE European Policy Experiment Project on The Impact of Virtual Exchange on Initial Teacher Education," see ED593745.]

A common assumption is that students prefer to work together with students from similar cultural backgrounds. In a group work context, students from different cultural backgrounds are "forced" to work together. This might lead to stress and anxiety but at the same time may allow students to learn from different perspectives. The prime goal of this article is to understand how international and home students from different cultural backgrounds build learning and work relationships with other students in and outside their classroom using an innovative quantitative method of Social Network Analysis in a pre-post test manner. In Study 1, 50 Spanish and 7 Erasmus economics students worked in self-selected teams. In Study 2, 69 primarily international students in a postgraduate management program in the United Kingdom worked in randomized teams. The results indicate that in Study 1 learning ties after 14 weeks were significantly predicted by the initial team division and friendship ties. The seven international students integrated well. In Study 2, learning ties after 14 weeks were primarily predicted by the team division, followed by initial friendship ties and conational friendships. Although international students developed strong (multinationality) team learning relationships, international students also kept strong links with students with the same cultural background. As the initial team division had an 8 times stronger effect on learning ties than cultural backgrounds, these results indicate that the instructional design of team work has a strong influence on how international and home students work and learn together.