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Francesca Helm is assistant professor of English at the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies, University of Padova in Italy. Her research research interests are in the fields of identity, intercultural learning, virtual exchange and internationalisation of education. She is currently leading the Monitoring and Evaluation in the European Commission’s recently launched Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange project. Recent publications include the volume Emerging Identities in Virtual Exchange https://research-publishing.net/book?10.14705/rpnet.2018.25.9782490057191

Mirjam Hauck is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Head of the Department of Languages (Faculty of Education and Language Studies) at the Open University/UK. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on the use of technologies for the learning and teaching of languages and cultures covering aspects such as task design, tutor role and training, the affordances of the new media, and e-literacy skills. Apart from regular presentations and invited contributions to conferences, seminars and workshops in Europe and the USA, she serves on the American Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium’s (CALICO) executive board and the European Association of Computer Assisted Language Learning’s (EUROCALL) executive committee. She also chairs the EUROCALL Teacher Education SIG. She is the co-editor of the European Journal of Open, Distance and E-learning (EURODL) and a member of the editorial board of the CALL journal. Her current research and publications explore the impact of mediation and the relevance of multimodal communicative competence for the development of intercultural communicative competence in online environments, particularly in the context of telecollaborative exchanges.