The Power of Virtual Exchange as an Overarching Tool to Unify Language, Culture, and Communication

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most classes in higher education were offered online, and student and staff mobility came to a sudden halt. With its focus on online interaction and collaboration between students from different cultural backgrounds, Virtual Exchange (VE) has presented itself as an excellent opportunity to students and educators to combine the benefits of both digitalization and internationalization. This paper looks at the role of a series of factors in the interdisciplinary VE called 'the new normality', which took place between BA Social Psychology students at a large public research institution in Spain and students from different BAs enrolled in Spanish proficiency courses at large public research university in the Netherlands. This project had two main goals: (1) to create an environment for students to share their pandemic experiences across cultures and disciplines; and (2) to determine to what extent this exchange of ideas contributed to the development of students' intercultural awareness and competence and communicative competence.