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This list of challenges and research gaps draws on a roundtable discussion that took place during the EVALUATE conference on "virtual exchange and its role in 21st-century teacher education" held at the University of León, Spain, in September 2019.

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• Produce robust evidence: More rigorous research is needed to confirm that virtual exchange programs really can help young people build empathy, intercultural competency and 21st-century skills such as critical digital literacies. Much of the evidence to date is anecdotal and needs to be bolstered by solid case studies as well as large-scale and longitudinal research from around the world. Delving more deeply into the efficacy of virtual exchanges compared with traditional classes will give teachers, scholars and policymakers a better, more nuanced understanding of how the exchanges work and what works best.

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• Build a coherent field: Virtual exchange research is more advanced in Europe, where it has had the attention of governments for the past few years, than in North America and other parts of the world. More needs to be done to build a worldwide community of practice that can set and advance a research agenda that will be useful to educators and policymakers everywhere.

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• Share information: Gathering and sharing virtual exchange research, case studies and tools – openly and globally and perhaps in one online space – would help avoid "reinventions of the wheel" and address the isolation and fragmentation that has inhibited evidence-based growth and improvement in the field.

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• Extend the reach of virtual exchanges: More could be done to reach young people and communities outside of higher education, connecting Indigenous and other cultural communities within countries, bridging rural/urban divides, and bringing diverse voices and perspectives more effectively into higher education.

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• Promote interdisciplinarity: Designing virtual exchange programs that deliberately engage participants from different faculties could help break down the traditional silos between academic disciplines. 

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• Boost teachers' status and enable continuous learning: Virtual exchanges in education use technology but are, above all, about connecting people, with the help of teachers. More should be done to reaffirm the centrality of teaching in virtual exchanges. To gain competence and confidence in this field, educators need support and training to increase their technical and digital literacies skills, at any stage of their careers.

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• Combat precarious work: The increasing precarity of work in higher education can make it difficult to get virtual exchange programs off the ground and to ensure their continuity. Being asked to take on additional, possibly unfamiliar work – such as introducing a virtual exchange component into a course – may further burden instructors already contending with worsening conditions in this sector, including poor pay, heavy workloads and job insecurity.

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       Learn more

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• Guth, S., Helm, F., Hightower, M., McCauley, J., & Stan, A-M. (2019, September 6). The field of virtual exchange: Where we are and how we may move forward. Roundtable at the final conference of the European Policy Experiment 'EVALUATE', University of León, Spain.