Flexible fidelity in virtual exchange design: Balancing fidelity and adaptation as factors in sustainable practices

Virtual exchange (VE) research has established several well-accepted course design models, organized around three stages: icebreakers, group activities, and collaborative projects. However, less is known about how course and task design contribute to sustaining VEs beyond implementation. This study’s purpose was to examine how course and task design support the long-term maintenance of co-designed VEs by presenting a subset of findings from my doctoral research, a descriptive multiple case study on sustainability factors in co-designed VEs. Semi-structured interviews and course documentation across six long-running VEs were deductively analyzed using implementation science constructs of fidelity and adaptation, followed by an inductive analysis. Findings show that all facilitators demonstrated “flexible fidelity” (i.e., a balance between fidelity and adaptation), maintaining learning objectives and course structure while adapting tasks, schedules, and technologies to meet students’ needs. Flexible fidelity supports the sustainability of VEs and highlights the relevance of implementation science as an analytical lens for VE research. Furthermore, these results suggest that VE facilitator training should explicitly teach flexible fidelity, emphasizing how the balance between defining learning objectives early and continuous task, schedule, and technological adaptation during and between iterations can strengthen VE sustainability across diverse institutional contexts.