Abstract:

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the International Exchange Committee of the Faculty of Information and Communication at Bunkyo University planned and implemented an online overseas study tour with the partner university, FPT University Vietnam, in fiscal year 2020 (April 1, 2020–March 31, 2021). The participants were 16 students from Information and Communication Faculty of Bunkyo University, Japan, and 13 students enrolled in Japanese language departments at universities in Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. It was the first online study tour held in Japanese to encourage interaction and understand the culture and customs of other Asian countries. The online tour lasted four days, a unique program that included presentations by student teams from each country, Japanese language classes, and discussions and debates among teams comprising members from all four countries. In this report, we describe the process of developing and implementing the first online training program in collaboration with overseas partner universities. Additionally, we will present the results of our analysis on Japanese and non-Japanese students’ impressions and intentions toward each of the cross-cultural online study tour program activities through statistical additive averages and correlations of data obtained from a questionnaire survey using the Likert scale that was conducted subsequent to the training program. Furthermore, based on the survey data, the usefulness of online international exchange training will be confirmed, and the applicability and issues for future class programs will be discussed. We hope that the results of this study will help universities in planning and implementing the online international exchange study tours during these challenging times.

Keywords:

Online study tour, Intercultural exchange, University students from four Asian countries, Microsoft Teams, Study tour in Japanese.