IVEC recognizes three outstanding virtual exchange practitioners as recipients of the Sarah Guth Scholarship, in memory of our friend and colleague. Sarah was a founding member of IVEC and a leading voice for equity in our community.
Priscilla Ferro, Professor and Researcher, Centro Paula Souza / UNESP – São José do Rio Preto, Brazil
Priscilla Ferro is a researcher and higher education professional at Centro Paula Souza, Brazil, where she works with research, extension, and internationalization initiatives. With more than 20 years of experience in language education, she studies learner autonomy and virtual exchange, with particular interest in learning autonomy in Virtual Exchange contexts. She is also a translator and has experience in teacher education, telecollaboration, and the development of institutional projects connecting language learning, intercultural collaboration, and higher education.
Olha Melnychuk, Associate Professor, Lutsk National Technical University, Ukraine
Olha Melnychuk, PhD, is an Associate Professor at Lutsk National Technical University, Ukraine, and a COIL Practitioner. Her academic and research interests include virtual exchange and Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), digital language education, artificial intelligence, and immersive technologies in higher education. She coordinates international collaborative learning initiatives and integrates virtual exchange into university curricula, connecting Ukrainian students with peers and educators across different countries. Her research explores the pedagogical potential of emerging technologies and internationally connected learning to enhance language education, student engagement, intercultural competence, and meaningful cross-cultural collaboration in higher education.
Dragana Vuković Vojnović, Assistant Professor and COIL Coordinator, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Dr. Dragana Vuković Vojnović is an Assistant Professor and COIL Coordinator at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad. She teaches English for Specific and Academic Purposes to undergraduate and master’s students of tourism and hospitality management. Her research focuses on contrastive corpus studies of collocations, rhetorical devices, and metadiscourse, as well as on the potential of applying innovative language-teaching methods through problem-based learning, virtual and online collaboration in an intercultural context. More recently, she has expanded her research interests to include the opportunities and challenges associated with the pedagogical applications of artificial intelligence (AI).
