Bringing “Internationalization at Home” Opportunities to Community Colleges: Design and Assessment of an Online Exchange Activity between U.S. and Japanese Students

Abstract

Increasing college students’ exposure to global contexts and improving their intercultural competency remain challenging educational objectives, especially at the community college level. Fortunately, the recent shift in higher education from study abroad opportunities toward so-called “internationalization at home” initiatives, where students interact with people from cultures outside their own while remaining on their home campuses, offers new options. In this article, we describe a virtual exchange activity that we conducted between our sociology courses at a community college in the United States and two universities in Japan. We show through our assessment of the students’ experiences that a well-coordinated, carefully crafted, technology-enhanced internationalization at home activity has the potential to offer important global learning opportunities and intercultural competency development for sociology students who may otherwise lack the means to participate in study abroad.