This past semester our part-time students of the Bachelor’s Program in Human Resources Management were able to participate in an online intercultural exchange with students from Waukesha County Technical College in Wisconsin, USA. They met online at least 3 times over a couple of months to have conversations about student life in Austria vs. Wisconsin, learning foreign languages, and comparing different aspects of cultural diversity. This is something we have done already a couple of years in a row and this coming semester our students of the Bachelor’s Program in Tourism & Hospitality Management will be participating in the exchange with another group of students also from Waukesha.
To finish off the project, our students were required to report on their experiences. As in the past, this semester’s group of students’ experiences were overwhelmingly positive. Students were provided with a list of possible topics to discuss, but most reported that they very quickly went off the script and had their own impromptu conversations. Each conversation was supposed to last at least 30 minutes but most students reported talking for hours! When asked if they would recommend this activity to other students at our university, the majority responded with a wholehearted, “Yes!”