IO7: Global competence through IT and serious games

Resources:

  • Global Conversations Program
  • Critical Incidents catalogue
  • Intercultural Awareness game.

The serious game: click on “Start” to start the game or copy this link:

https://view.genial.ly/62357eb7cc269a0018082ef0/interactive-content-intercultural-empathy

Scripts of the 3 different stories:

Partners:

IMT Mines Albi, France & Volga State University of Technology, Russia & KTH, Sweden & Cambrige University, UK

Goals

Develop, test and disseminate learning activities for Global Competence for a sustainable internationalisation in integrated courses.

Rationale

With more and more international cooperation being carried out in environments where English is used as lingua franca, it is also important to develop learning activities focused specifically on Global Competence, building on students’ existing language skills and life experiences. The definition of Global Competence by the OECD is “Global competence is the capacity to examine local, global and intercultural issues, to understand and appreciate the perspectives and world views of others, to engage in open, appropriate and effective interactions with people from different cultures, and to act for collective well-being and sustainable development”.

International cooperation in this project will allow to test the created activities in different countries and languages with the help of students with different backgrounds and industrial partners. The activities will all be carried out in several languages to create and test teaching material in language neutral environments with the aim to develop a guidebook for teaching material on intercultural communcation activities in language neutral courses.

The students will be actively involved in the developement and the feedback concerning the activities and empowered to suggest and design new content. These activities are also relevant for staff training.

A comparative report on engineering students’ online intercultural communication sessions will be issued, focused on cultural diversity and stereotypes, engineering programs across EHEA (European Higher Education Area); global scientific issues will be established before creating the final Intellectual Output.

Target groups

Undergraduate engineering students in HE who need to develop their Global Competences

IO7-A Intercultural communication

This Intellectual Output of the BADGE project aims at developing an online module for global competence. It includes several activities for joint online intercultural communication, relevant to all participating partners involved. The key components of the activities are :

  • pre- and post- surveys. The pre-survey that checks readiness for intercultural communication, specified by students’ psychological, language and cultural background, topics for discussion
  • issues to be lectured,
  • intercultural awareness days or weeks
  • full groups meetings together with the teachers
  • the topics and questions for students’ online intercultural communication in micro-groups.
  • feedback
  • detailed reports prepared by students.

One of the major values professional and personal that is to be developed by the course participants is respect for people from different cultures, respect for a variety of perspectives or choices made by
another colleague, and respect for the ideas and input of others as different topics are addressed. This online interaction can be integrated into the language courses or into intercultural communication/global competence courses. The necessity for preparation before in particular micro- group discussion is especially critical for the students with a poor level of language proficiency.

IO7 – B Serious game for Global Competence

The Serious game will encompass a wide range of real-life working situations and possible solutions described and taken from the interviews with the CEO of the Ltd Omega-R and other industrial partners. Previously complied dilemma bank and situations will be integrated into the game engine to allow create simulations of various real-working life situations. The serious game will include dilemmas to tackle; decision-making styles in different cultures with limited information and in times of crisis; avoiding bias when recruiting for international projects; onboarding and intercultural gamification experience for implementing engineering projects. The serious game will bring a focus on what behaviors can be explained as cultural or personal; strategies to handle behaviors in international meetings of project teams; clarifying values and motivations in different cultures; testing the consequences of decisions made.

Intellectual Output IO7 – A

E-Guidebook with language-neutral (i.e., not tied to any particular language) learning activities focusing on new and innovative intercultural communication practices for engineering schools and technical universities. The guidebook will include a set of recommendations and guidelines and will serve as a road-map for improving practices strengthening intercultural communication competencies, thus increasing capacity and professionalism of students and practitioners to work at EU/international level.

Intellectual Output IO7 – B

Serious game for a serious game in order to develop Global Competence through games. The app can be adapted to different languages and cultures.