Digital technologies for intercultural exchange and transdisciplinary exploration
By Jack Tsao, Sakinah Alhadad, Danielle Heinrichs, Suraiya Abdul Hameed, Kate McLay
About
This case study examined digitally mediated online international exchanges in facilitating intercultural and transdisciplinary learning and problem-solving. Held during the COVID-19 pandemic, the exchange connected students from universities in Hong Kong and Australia to collaborate on a research project exploring student wellbeing. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus, the research highlights how digital technologies create spaces for collaboration, ambiguity, and reflexivity through leveraging the intercultural for multimodal, inquiry-based, and collaborative learning.
Key findings and contributions
- Digital platforms can leverage students’ cultural and disciplinary backgrounds in collaborative peer-to-peer learning and real-world problem-solving that build shared narratives and diverse expressions.
- Experiences of ambiguity, conflict, and intercultural tensions through collaborative and digitally enabled multimodal activities can provoke students to critically reflect on their assumptions and expand their perspectives, fostering reflexive and adaptive capacities.
- Creative and multimodal methods, such as body mapping, re-storying, and digital storytelling, which encouraged students to integrate subjective lived experiences with academic knowledge for transdisciplinary problem-solving.
Implications for practice or policy
- Higher education institutions can design and integrate structured online international exchange programs, such as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), into curricula to provide equitable and accessible transdisciplinary learning experiences.
- Educators can leverage creative digital tools like Miro, Canva, and storytelling platforms to encourage intercultural dialogue, encourage reflexivity, and engage students in complex, real-world issues.
- Institutions should adopt policies that empower students as co-creators of knowledge by offering mentoring and research opportunities, integrating such programmes into formal curricula, and providing platforms to disseminate their research findings beyond classrooms.
Publication
Tsao, J., Alhadad, S., Heinrichs, D.H., Hameed, S.A., McLay, K (2025). The digital-intercultural-transdisciplinary nexus: Online international exchanges for transdisciplinary education. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.9620