A Role-Reversal Model of Telecollaborative Practice: The Student-Driven and Student-Managed 'FloCo'

This paper, based both on a talk given at the BMELTT symposium in June 2017 and one given at the UNICollaboration conference held in Krakow in April 2018, reports on "FloCo" (Florida Universitària/ Coventry University), a telecollaborative project where the roles of teacher and student were reversed. A student from Coventry University (CU), studying on a Bachelor of Arts Honours in English and TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), obtained a third year placement to teach English in Spain at Florida Universitària (FU) in València. The student had taken part in the online intercultural exchange "MexCo," between Coventry and Mexico, in her first year at university, and decided to set up a similar exchange between the class of students she was teaching in Spain and Year 1 students on Spanish degrees at CU. The shared 'expert student'/staff reflections on the project are reported here and compared with the outcomes of related online intercultural exchanges (e.g. "MexCo" and "CoCo"). [For the complete volume, "Flipping the Blend through MOOCs, MALL and OIL--New Directions in CALL," see ED585277.]