A British council’s Gender Equality Partnerships grant, as well as strong international network links in the school, meant that the City Law School was recently able to run a transnational hybrid project focusing on Gender Equality and Law. This project brought together 20 students, 10 each from Udayana University (Bali, Indonesia) and City Law school. These students were able to learn about gender and law within a different jurisdiction from theirs, exchange ideas, and collaboratively develop research projects based on chosen areas of interest. However, all this took a great deal of planning and thinking. Thanks to some great collaborative work across the different teams in both the universities, the project had a successful outcome.
LEaD (Learning Enhancement and Development) was one of the teams that played a role in shaping the learning experience. Drawing on insights from the 2021 Virtual Summer School with Jindal University, LEaD supported the academic team in designing a pedagogically sound and inclusive hybrid programme. The focus was on how to foster a transnational community of learning including interaction, and co-creation through the effective use of digital tools.
Programme Structure
The project was carefully planned to accommodate both time zones and learning needs:
Four hybrid workshops (3 hours each) were scheduled, mindful of the London–Bali time difference.
Clear learning objectives and outcomes were defined, with inclusive activities. This included testing and checking the different digital tools that were available to both universities equally.
City Law School and Udayana academics curated the legal content, made sure it was aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and planned for mini-lectures with some key guest speakers.
What Worked Well
Right at the beginning a playful and interactive Zoom session helped the two set of students get to know each other, build confidence with digital tools such as using the whiteboard for drawing how they felt about the project, answering polls as well as creating a collaborative document where they suggested best practice for their hybrid interaction. This was a key step in getting all students comfortable with the virtual space as well as troubleshoot any issue that could arise in the actual sessions.
We also set up a back channel using the Zoom teams chat function for asynchronous communication: a dedicated digital space to enable informal interaction before, during, and after sessions.
Another area that we were all mindful of was to develop an inclusive language approach to support students whose mother tongue was not English, this included:
Repeating questions in the Zoom chat to aid comprehension.
Creating a shared glossary of key terms and concepts.
Allowing time to unpack idiomatic and nuanced expressions.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
There were indeed some challenges, the main one being, unsurprisingly perhaps, connectivity issues. The stability of the internet in Bali affected video quality during the first session. However, we had planned that eventuality in and so the chat function provided backup. The students themselves were very proactive in communicating with their peers through the different platforms they had available, this included WhatsApp as well as the Zoom chat.
Another issue that we came across was document access. The O365 Word document revoked access after 12 hours, this was something that we had not picked up while testing. The quick solution here was to switch to Google Docs for stability.
Platform Preferences.
Students had to complete a substantial amount of asynchronous work, including planning and researching their chosen topics together. As a result, many naturally turned to WhatsApp for communication outside of scheduled sessions. Although a Zoom back channel was provided this was not used very much. We think that any future iterations of similar projects would benefit from building up engagement within these dedicated Zoom, or Teams, channels from the outset. Even though WhatsApp had, on this occasion, proved to be very useful it would be better to support alternatives to reduce the need for students to share personal contact details, like phone numbers, and promote a more secure and inclusive communication environment.
We hope that this project has provided some insight into the possibilities offered for hybrid collaboration and is useful for colleagues looking at building intercultural competencies for students, or looking to leverage City St George’s educational platforms more effectively for enhancing the educational digital experience. If you would like to discuss your own ideas for a Virtual Exchange initiative, please do contact your LEaD school representative.
If you work at City St George’s you can find out more about this project by joining the City St George’s Learning Teaching community where there will be a Learning circle online talk about this project on the 2nd October at 3 pm.
