Intercultural Competence: Fostering Student Skill Development During Emergency Remote Learning

For many instructors, 2020 brought a need to adjust teaching strategies for remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Fall 2020, we transitioned an Introduction to Animal Agriculture course from face-to-face to a remote format. The change presented challenges in implementing engaging teaching pedagogies to create an online student-centered learning environment. Even in an online format, it is necessary to develop student intercultural competence (IC) as the agricultural industry is becoming increasingly globalized. Therefore, the objective of the study was to measure changes in student IC before and after participating in the remote course with intercultural learning (ICL) assignments embedded into animal science topics. Students (n=161) were assigned to an intervention (n=93) or control (n=68) group based on their randomly selected laboratory period. Students in the intervention group received five ICL assignments focused on global animal agriculture while students in the control group received five unrelated assignments. A pre- and post-course Intercultural Development Inventory was administered to all students (response rate=88.2%). Students in the intervention group had a greater increase in IC compared with the students in the control group (p