At the beginning of 2020, we experienced that a lot of activities, that we normally do, had to be put on paus due to the pandemic. One of these activities was international exchange programs in higher education. One way to continue working with international exchange could be to work more with international exchange online, which sometimes is called technology-supported internationalization or Internationalization-at-home – IaH (Mittelmeier et l., 2021). In March 2021, we launched an exchange program for vocational student teachers in Norway, Germany, Sweden, and Turkey, supported by the exchange program ERASMUS. The overarching aim was to provide the preservice teachers with insights in vocational training in other countries and thereby in developing and strengthening their intercultural skills as well as English and digital skills  

Students in all four countries studied one or several of three online MOOCs developed within the project. The themes of the MOOCs were 1) Democracy and citizenship, 2) Sustainable development, and 3) values. A fourth course was about how to create digital stories through short videos. After working with the MOOCs locally, the students met in international colloquia collaboratively creating digital storytelling, i.e. short videos, on the themes. The way of working also meant that the students needed to collaborate online and to practice their English throughout digital storytelling production.

In the project, 142 students from our own university in Sweden participated together with student teachers from Norway, Germany, and Turkey. About ten teacher educators from the four countries have had the opportunity to participate in four MOOCs through a common learning platform. Three MOOCs focused on the three themes mentioned above, and the fourth MOOC covered how to create digital storytelling.

The study has its base in a sociocultural tradition, which emphasizes learning through interaction with the support of mediating tools (Ivarsson et al., 2009). Language is described as the most important tool for communication and thinking and therefore also an important tool for learning (Säljö, 2014). In a multimodal setting like the online MOOCs where the preservice teachers were expected to produce videos in collaboration with others, language fulfils a bridging and important function (Ivarsson et al., 2009). In this context, the language was English which was not any student’s mother tongue.

The aim of this study is to contribute knowledge in the field of international exchange between vocational preservice teachers in times when travelling is restricted.

The research questions are as follows:

• How do the preservice teachers experience the participation in an international exchange through online technology?
• What are the advantages, disadvantages and challenges working this way according to the Swedish preservice teachers and their teacher educators? 

Interesting in this specific context has been how the student have used, experienced and communicated through the available technological resources, and how they relate to the development project’s overarching aim (to develop intercultural, digital and English competence).

The study is a case study inspired by action research, focusing on the students that volunteered in the international seminars. They were about 50 students in three groups, and there were also a few individual presentations internationally. Data derive from different sources. Project documents and MOOCs will be analysed as well as written summaries from the work in the other countries in the project. These data from the overall project and serve as a basis for the analyses of the preservice teachers’ experiences. The Swedish preservice teachers and their two teacher educators will be interviewed to get data to better understand their experiences and how the resources could be used. Included in data are also the digital storytelling by the interviewed preservice teachers. The interviews with the preservice teachers will be conducted as semi-structured interviews (Kvale & Brinkman, 2008) through an online video tool. The vocational teacher program is run online in combination with three meetings per semester on campus, which means that some of the preservice teachers live quite far from the university. The interview questions concerned their experiences from the project with focus on interculture, technology and language, how they think they can use these experiences in their future profession with their future upper-secondary vocational pupils, and how the project could be developed further within teacher education. Data will be analysed through a text analysis in terms of an expanded text concept (Fejes & Thornberg, 2015). The results are reported and discussed with a focus on the students’ and their teacher educators' experiences of the exchange project by using the digital tools.

The project is still in its infancy, and interviews will be carried out during the next months. Because of this there are still no results, but we believe that our study can contribute knowledge to the field of internationalization of vocational teacher education.

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