The University of Kent organises short exchange programmes annually with our partnership universities in Japan. Sadly, all programmes this year were cancelled due to the ongoing pandemic. Instead, the Language Centre organised an online networking event for students at Kent studying Japanese and students at Kobe Women’s University in Japan.
Japanese Tutor, Mano Suzuki shares, “The online networking event was called ‘Oshaberi Café’ – Oshaberi means “chattering” in Japanese. Over 25 students from the two universities joined the event on 18 February 2021. We used the online meeting site called Spatial Chat, which enables people to move freely in a virtual room and chat like in a party with a lot of people. Students enjoyed talking about their hobbies and interests in two languages. It was a successful event, and many students requested to have another session again in the questionnaire after the event.
A free talk style had worked well for some students, but others had felt it was difficult to talk without any set-up topics. So, during the second session on the 16 March held via Zoom, students were allocated into groups and worked out given tasks together in breakout rooms. Face-to-face is preferred but we will definitely keep an online networking session for students, even if everything goes back to normal in the near future.
Feedback from the students was very positive, with comments: “I had so much fun!”, “This is a very good idea and I would love for there to be more events like this in the future!“, and “I think spatial chat and zoom are both good and I enjoy having a task we can use to give us ideas for conversation topics. I really enjoy these events and its fun and cool to meet people from so far away!”