Speakers

Dr. Robert O’Dowd is Professor  for English as a Foreign Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of León, Spain. He has taught at universities in Ireland, Germany and Spain and has over 40 publications on the application of Virtual Exchange in university and pre-university education settings. He was the founding president of the UNICollaboration academic organization for telecollaboration and virtual exchange (www.unicollaboration.org) and has been invited to be plenary speaker at international conferences in the US, Asia and across Europe.

Among recent activities, he was invited in 2019 to be co-editor of a special edition of the prestigious journal Language Learning & Technology on the theme of Virtual Exchange in Foreign Language Education. He also coordinated the Erasmus projects Integrating International Networks in Higher Education (INTENT) (2011-2014) and the European Policy Experiment Evaluating and Upscaling Telecollaborative Teacher Education (EVALUATE) (2017-2019). He is currently coordinating the Erasmus+ European Policy Experiment Virtual Innovation and Support Networks for Teachers (VALIANT) (2021-2024) and collaborates with other experts in the UNICollaboration organisation to offer comprehensive evaluation studies of Virtual Exchange programmes. Robert’s publications are available here: http://unileon.academia.edu/RobertODowd and you can follow him on twitter @robodowd.

Dr. Anna Nicolaou is a member of the Special Teaching Staff at the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT). She holds a Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin, focusing on Intercultural Education and Global Competence learning through Virtual Exchange, a Master's degree in English Language Studies and Methods from Warwick University  and a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Athens . Her research interests include intercultural education, virtual exchange, multilingualism, internationalisation, immersive technologies, and computer-assisted language learning. She has published scientific articles in internationally acclaimed journals and has participated in research programs and academic conferences.

Dr. Anna Wärnsby is an Associate Professor of English and a teacher educator at the department of Culture, Languages and Media at Malmö University, Sweden. She teachers courses on grammar, phonetics and phonology, morphology, academic writing, subject didactics and assessment in the undergraduate teacher education programmes, and courses  in academic writing and research communication at postgraduate level. Her main research contributions so far are in academic literacy with a focus on writing and situated orality, assessment, subject didactics, and linguistics.

Malin Reljanovic Glimäng is a teacher educator and PhD candidate at the department of Culture, Languages and Media at Malmö University, Sweden. She teaches courses in literature, cultural studies and English as a global language. Her research interests involve virtual exchange and internationalization of higher education with a focus on critical interculturality,  multiliteracies and global citizenship education. She has published articles on virtual exchange in international journals, and she is an associate member of the expert community Language and Culture, in the European Association for International Education, EAIE