Welcome back to my recurring post on the blog, this time regarding the fourth week. During this week, we had an important meeting with all the members of the project (about 80 participants out of the 117 active members) and professor Mariotti. I strongly believe it was significant for everybody and that everyone walked away with a change. Today I will discuss the significance of this meeting (the first meeting addressed to all project members with professor Mariotti since the candidates selection and the very starting one, one month ago) and some new insight I was able to grasp thanks to the 責任者 (sekininsha, students with responsibilities) of the groups I coordinate (channel 1 to 10).


To understand how the students felt just before the midterm meeting, I believe we need to discuss engagement and satisfaction with the project. In last week’s survey, we asked to give a numerical judgement to the whole project to get the gist of each member (and collective) satisfaction. Overall, students’ perceived experience seems to be very positive.
The survey for students from Japanese universities (even though about one-third of the students still have to respond to it) shows that 100% of them evaluated the project positively (from here on I will define “positive” every value between 6 and 10), with the 31.6% that gave a full 10! (Thank you). Moving on to the survey submitted to Ca’ Foscari’s members of the project, we can see that even if no 10 showed up, 95% of the students evaluated this experience positively. Finally, we submitted another survey to students attending the 自由会話 (jiyū kaiwa, free conversation) lessons: some of the respondents were students of the project, who answered to this kind of survey from their own student’s perspective.). 94.6% of the answers were positive, with 5.4% of the students giving 10 out of 10. With a simple count, the average between all these three surveys is 7.8, while the mode is 8.
I think we can conclude that the vast majority of the students are quite happy with this new challenge. Moreover, looking at the other questions’ answers to the questionnaire, we learned so many things that we could implement in the next edition of Virtual Exchange. The general consensus is encouraging us to shoot for a future reiteration of this project.
However, as I was saying we received those answers just before our big meeting. During the meeting, we were able to get to know many members of this community more closely and, at the same time, we were able to reinforce once more our goals and intentions with a rather unique pathos. This was rather difficult at our very first explanatory meeting. This is only my impression, but observing the students after the midterm briefing (and the survey) leads me to believe that something changed in them.
During this week, it will be my pleasure to participate in different 自由会話 (jiyū kaiwa, free conversation) classrooms (where project participants are carrying out part of the project), to understand if my feelings are true or if I was influenced by my enthusiasm only.
Finally, in this last segment, I will write about my latest meeting with the 責任者 (sekininsha, students with responsibilities) with whom I work (1:10). Last Thursday, they asked for a specific formative meeting for facilitators (their role inside the free conversation groups) of this project and we discussed the possibility of periodically changing the main theme of their groups.
In fact, it seemed that even if the first week of the project was in part dedicated to learning how to engage and to prepare for the following 自由会話 (jiyū kaiwa, free conversation) lessons. Those hints, given before the real engagement inside the virtual classrooms, were not enough to reassure participants about such a new kind of active interaction.
Moreover, with 責任者 (sekininsha, students with responsibilities), we are trying to learn from each other as we go. In each meeting, we always spend time to learn from practical issues in Slack channels or in free conversation classes. Most of the time, simple bits of advice are enough, for example illustrating simple strategies to help other members understand what you are saying, advising to use technology to our advantage, can be enough. However, communication strategies are not always sufficient. I believe we could also use a meeting or two (or three or four) to share our values and goals. This does not need to become a top-down teaching session, rather we hope for a reciprocal dialogue inside of the community with 責任者 (sekininsha, students with responsibilities) so that we can act collectively to strengthen just growing community.
Lastly, regarding the possibility of periodically changing the theme. I am still reflecting upon it. I believe that, of course, students who are participating in the project need to keep the right to change the group every 3 or 4 lessons. However, how could we be able to eviscerate and find out problems (thus propose solutions) for each topic we address if we do not spend enough time thinking about it? I will keep thinking about this, in the meanwhile I hope to hear your opinions as well.

This week I choose not to use any citation so to make this entry easier to digest. Nevertheless, I hope this was compelling and more interesting to read. Please, feel free to comment. I gladly reply to everyone.