Abstract:

International communication focusing mainly on development of intercultural communication using different sustainable digital tools has been established both at universities and in other contexts worldwide. The focus nowadays is not only on the necessity of using these sustainable online tools for increasing the students’ ability to communicate about various topics depending on their field of study but also on developing their ability of critical thinking and their awareness of different intercultural issues present in every international communication. The video-conference is thus one of the ways to work with internationalization in a sustainable way in education, giving opportunities for the exchange of ideas and experiences both at personal and professional levels without mobility. The focus of this study lies mainly in student voices evaluating the well-established online cooperation of international and domestic/local students at Uppsala University in Sweden and University of Pardubice in Czechia. It provides detailed insights into different perspectives of the personal and professional development of the student participants based on the questionnaire responses, reflections and reports submitted by students within five years of experience with video-conferencing. Based on the different types of tasks used, the authors provide an analysis of the positive and negative student comments and answer the following research questions: How do students experience the autonomous student interactive video-conferences in an international context? What issues are raised when dealing with intercultural differences? How can this type of communication increase the student intercultural awareness, critical thinking and internationalisation in their education? With the background of the theoretical approaches and methods the results provide the student perspectives on this international sustainable communication.

Keywords:

Sustainable communication, student voice, videoconferencing, internationalization, intercultural communication.