Intercultural Collaborative Teaching and Learning in Online Environments: e-Quality in Global Media Education Case Study

This paper examines international students’ experiences during an online course on global media education that was co-organized in 2021 and 2022 with universities from Lapland, Finland and Hong Kong, China. Teaching and learning in online environments started an exponential ascent during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is likely to continue in the globalizing post pandemic world, in which the participants are becoming all the more international and from diverse backgrounds. Through a content analysis of the students’ learning diaries, this paper investigates the ways in which cultural diversity was experienced during online teaching and learning and how the students' perceptions and cultural sensitivity developed during the courses. The findings are reflected on the five pillars of online pedagogical framework, which is then further developed to encompass the dimension of intercultural communication for the improvement of intercultural sensitivity and interrelations. We discuss the need to promote intercultural understanding in online education so that we can communicate more effectively and that messages are not lost in translation. We propose a pedagogical model for online teaching and learning in intercultural contexts that can support equity and quality in e-learning called e-quality.