Emerging trends in telecollaboration and virtual exchange: a bibliometric study

Abstract

As physical mobility finds itself impeded by the COVID-19 crisis, the world witnesses the potential of technology for connecting students who are physically distanced inside and cross-borders. In such scenarios, telecollaboration and virtual exchange have gained increased attention as powerful pedagogical strategies to allow for the continuity of intercultural exchanges and understanding the trends of this growing field can be of high significance to practitioners when planning future related initiatives. Although telecollaboration and virtual exchange are not new phenomena, to the best of our knowledge, a thorough bibliometric study of the area, considering the characteristics of its publications and its scientific community, has not yet been developed. This study carried out a bibliometric analysis of the telecollaboration and virtual exchange research field using a set of 254 articles from the Web of Science and Scopus databases with the objective of characterising the area as well as identifying research tendencies. In particular, this study uses four analytical scientometric tools: co-citation, co-authorship, keywords co-occurrence analysis and identification of research trends. This study identified emerging and declining themes in the field of telecollaboration and virtual exchange, confirming that the practice is increasingly adopting diverse formats and cutting across different knowledge fields. In addition, results showed that international collaboration so far involves few countries and there is much space to widen co-authorship networks to enhance intercultural exchanges. The review also explores the benefits and drawbacks of the technological tools adopted in the studies from our sample database.