Abstract:

Effective multidisciplinary and multicultural working is one of the most desirable skills employers cite for hiring new professionals. Therefore, it is of particular importance to enhance the sociocultural skills of graduates by building opportunities for development into curricula. Even though most curricula comprise of collaborative activities, these usually occur under a framework where students share similar sociocultural characteristics, i.e., degree, nationality and language. This differs significantly from what students face in the workplace or when they attend their first job interview. Besides, the SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has emphasised the importance of communicative skills, highlighting the significance of arranging and conducting virtual meetings. These skills have become extremely important and are often used to reduce unnecessary commuting and related costs to increase productivity. Hence, novel activities must be implemented to improve students’ communicative skills to prepare them for their future professional endeavours. These sociocultural and communicative skills inherently relate to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) to ensure quality education, decent work, reduction of inequalities and alliance building.

Given this background, this pedagogical experience has put in touch students from different nationalities (British, Portuguese and Spanish), conducting their degrees (Chemistry and Chemical Engineering) at the University of York (UK) and the University of Zaragoza (Spain). They have been split into international pairs, including two groups with both members based at the same institution (in-place pairs) and another two pairs working remotely (e-pairs). During the project execution, the students created educational videos covering several biorefinery topics and posted this material on social media (such as Twitter, YouTube and Tik-Tok). A systems thinking educational framework was employed as part of this activity to help students transition from a reductionist understanding of a particular area to a holistic understanding of an integrated biorefinery concept. At the same time, its collaborative and international character can also help students develop and enhance their communicative skills, as they are expected to exchange emails, arrange and conduct (face-to-face and/or virtual) meetings to create inclusive videos (adding subtitles and using different languages).

Measures of performance outcomes achieved with this cooperative project will be outlined during the presentation of the material created and at the end-of-term examination. Additionally, a comparison will be established between the quality of the works and the insights gained by the students into their topics when they worked alone and in national and international pairs. An anonymous, open-ended questionnaire was distributed to gather information about the students’ engagement and opinions. The influence of the type of collaboration (in-place or virtual) was assessed on the students’ interaction (number of emails exchanged and number/type of meetings conducted) and the quality of the material (video/s) created. The limiting number of studies addressing international (in-place or virtual) students’ collaboration, along with the intrinsic novelty of making students responsible for developing educational material, makes our experience an important step in understanding how to facilitate global and inclusive education.

Keywords:

Cooperation, Educational Videos, International Collaboration, Biorefinery, Multiculturalism, Multidisciplinarity.