Evaluating Students’ Perceptions on the Effectiveness of Online Intercultural Learning Experience via a SPOC

With advances in telecommunication technologies, many institutions are deploying various online learning platforms for curriculum designers to create opportunities for international contact and intercultural exchange for their students with less physical and time constraints. Thus, students' learning contents can be enriched with the integration of intercultural dimensions which contribute to actualizing the concept of internationalizing the curriculum (Leask, 2013). An increasing demand to develop small private online courses (SPOCs) and the emergence of new technologies which allow students to interact with their invited overseas counterparts without leaving their respective hometowns, have given to the concept of 'Internationalization at Home' (IaH) (Landorf, Doscher, & Hardrick, 2018). In order to provide students with the opportunity to learn with their overseas counterparts without leaving their homes, collaborative online learning could be a way forward. Two Asian partner universities located in Hong Kong and Singapore, with the same institutional strategic goal of "Internationalization" had worked together to enrich a diverse group of (n=93) research postgraduate students (referred as 'teaching assistants' [TAs] in this paper) by organizing a joint venture on collaborative online learning during the first semester of the 2018-2019 academic year. Participating TAs in this study had different levels of prior online learning experience. A 3-week online course was developed by a team from the teaching and learning office of a leading liberal arts university in Hong Kong (U1), using a proprietary e-learning platform. Out of the 93 TAs, 11 TAs from a leading technological university in Singapore (U2) enrolled in this online course. The purpose of the 3-week online course was to provide TAs with the key teaching and learning concepts and related pedagogies for teaching undergraduates at university. These concepts were similar to the curriculum contents of the TA training courses offered by U1 and U2 respectively. The online learning platform provided a variety of learning features such as the use of videos, quizzes, graded tests, articles and online asynchronous discussion forums for participants from different parts of the world to interact with each other. The aim of the study was to evaluate students' perceptions on their online intercultural learning experience under a 3-phase strategic framework for implementation. Using a mixed method approach, both