We recently caught up with Gabriel Flacks, PhD candidate, and the Texas International Education Consortium’s Steven Kroman, MA, about virtual exchange (VE) and how TIEC is helping its members find easier ways to get more faculty involved. Flacks is the CEO and co-founder of Linkr Education, as well as humanities professor and certificate coordinator at Champlain College. Kroman is TIEC’s senior director of global programs, has run numerous VE courses himself, and is one of the original instructors behind TIEC’s Virtual Exchange Academy.
If you’re ready for a deep dive on virtual education, this is it. From two seasoned implementers and VE champions, the conversation between Flacks and Kroman delved into the more fundamental whys of VE for students and teachers, as well as why both see excitement—and even institutionalization—growing for connected classrooms in Texas and beyond. And, of course, we talked in detail about the role of technology and how it can be a hindrance or a way to open doors and build communities internationally.
Making a (Different) Case for Virtual Exchange
VE advocates usually start by listing the benefits of building cross-cultural competency and a broader global understanding for students. Flacks laughs when he recounts his own path to connected classrooms. His original goals weren’t nearly as lofty, he claims. He was simply trying to improve his courses overall and bring a more modern approach to his own teaching pedagogy.
“First [intention] was making all the courses better. Second was intercultural and international competence. But for me, it was in that order,” Flacks explained.
He wanted to incorporate more student-centered approaches into how he taught. He cites the traditional learning model—one professor, a lecture hall full of students, plenty of writing but with only the one professor who’ll read it—as an unnatural departure from real life. He wanted the classroom experience to more closely mimic life outside it. At the time (2010ish, we’ll say), social media platforms were becoming a main fixture in the daily experiences for most students. As Flacks started to incorporate forums and assignments that allowed his students to write for each other, right away he saw a jump in the quality of writing.
“The writing improves immediately and it's because [the students] understand that someone's going to read this, and it's not just the teacher. It's a real easy way to upgrade those writing and communication skills simply by giving them what they want too, which is relevance—a reason to want to look good,” said Flacks.
Kroman relates the same phenomenon to his time teaching TESOL and the improvement when English language learners were writing or speaking in front of peers.
“There's a whole body of research around using ‘authentic audiences’ in education ... It creates a different learning environment than the traditional classroom setup,” explained Kroman.
With that improvement, Flacks began to look for ways to broaden that authentic audience for students, and VE was a natural fit. “When you're creating and writing for somebody in another part of the world, you bring value just through sharing your ideas. You might not think [your ideas or observations] are that exciting, but to somebody in another part of the planet, they've maybe never heard of anything like that. So it opens the mind a little bit about your own self and your own experience,” he reflected.
By giving students a partner in another institution, he helped free up his students from typical learning contexts. It also gave his students an appreciation for how students learn different things in different spaces at different times.
“Virtual exchange gives the balance of self-confidence and humility in equal measure, which are both really valuable,” said Flacks.
Connected classrooms have another set of benefits for professors as well. The first, Flacks explained, is that by adding a second set of students from a different institution, educators have an easy way of updating the material.
“As an educator, your material is never the same twice. This group of students has all of these different experiences so by empowering students, the faculty member is able to stay fresh, stay engaged and informed about what's happening with the people in front of them—which otherwise is not always easy to tease out of them,” said Flacks. “It gives [the professor] the opportunity to know about your class in a way that you can't send a SurveyMonkey and say, ‘Just tell me.’ But when they're doing it authentically for a student in another part of the world, they open up in a very different way. So you get peers, you get international, and you get your subject matter refreshed.”
Software Development to Meet a Need: Finding a Middle Ground
By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many connected classrooms advocates had already formalized ways to approach VE in a higher education setting. Programs like the State University of New York’s Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) approach gave structure and philosophy behind how two faculty members could design rigorous VE curriculum. With international travel on hold, VE again took a leap forward in popularity.
In 2020, TIEC saw a natural role to help member universities try out VE, especially with study abroad grounded for so many students. With the help of the Aspen Institute’s Chris Stevens Initiative, we launched TIEC’s first Virtual Exchange Academy with the idea of training Texas faculty and their international partners on how to get started with connected classrooms.
As TIEC ran connected classrooms programs ourselves—and helped train faculty at our own member universities and partners around the world over the next couple of years—Kroman explains that he and the TIEC team faced challenges in finding a technology platform that truly worked for the purpose of VE.
TIEC’s story echoes Flacks’s own search for the right technology platform for VE, a challenge which eventually led him to co-found a software company. Flacks’s struggle initially came with two institutions each trying to use a different traditional learning management system (LMS).
“Regardless of other limitations, if there're two institutions with different sets of students using a different LMS, there's no way to bring them together,” Flacks explained. So began Flacks’s quest for a ‘neutral third space’ where collaboration could happen between students and faculty across schools, outside of each’s LMS.
The temptation at the time was to use the big social media platforms like Facebook or WhatsApp for VE. But there, he ran into a few challenges, a significant one being student privacy and security. The big social platforms couldn’t guarantee either and once the EU’s GDPR rules came into place, Flacks’s collaboration options were limited. The social platforms also didn’t lend themselves to longer form academic writing. Paired with ads, and enough ambiguity regarding where a student’s material goes and who ultimately owns it, Flacks saw the opportunity for a better solution.
Faced with these constraints, Flacks set out to build something new. The result: Linkr.
TIEC + Linkr: Building a Community and a Testing Ground
In the nearly ten years since, Flacks co-founded Linkr with the goal of creating a learning platform that meets the needs of academia while making it easy for students and faculty to interact genuinely across institutions.
TIEC first connected with Linkr while looking for a better tech solution for our own grant-funded virtual international exchange programs. What started as a practical need has since evolved into a formal partnership—one grounded in shared values and a commitment to lowering the barriers for faculty who want to bring a connected classroom experience to their courses.
Today, we proudly offer a dedicated TIEC private network on the Linkr platform for all of our member institutions. That means any faculty on a member campus can build a course within Linkr inside the TIEC-dedicated private social network, invite their students and exchange partners, and even access a growing library of resources drawn from our own Virtual Exchange Academy. For TIEC members, the platform includes a dedicated group forum to help faculty find collaborators across our network of HEIs in Texas and abroad.
While course access remains tightly controlled by faculty admins within TIEC’s private network on Linkr, the platform gives students a glimpse into the broader network of international learning happening across TIEC member campuses as other live courses are listed. Custom school branding is also available separately through Linkr for institutions looking to create their own dedicated space for VE courses.
“The TIEC private social network has its own personality. Each faculty member can add a class, invite a collaborative teaching partner to co-teach, and invite students to do their connected classrooms work there. The platform also supports top-down offerings like VE training for faculty. There’s also a new private group Steven [Kroman] added, where faculty can meet and post ‘partnership classifieds.’ Faculty can use the platform for some planning or do it externally, like in Google Docs or WhatsApp. Then, they can run the course on Linkr,” explained Flacks. “TIEC provides the whole pathway—from learning about virtual exchange, to finding a partner, to implementing a course—all on one platform.”
Importantly, the relationship between TIEC and Linkr is collaborative. Feedback from TIEC members has directly shaped new features set to roll out in summer and fall 2025—including a “subgroups” tool to better manage COIL-style classes and a built-in scheduling feature to help international student teams coordinate without relying on third-party apps. As Kroman pointed out, scheduling across time zones is one of the most common—and underrated—challenges for students doing global group work for the first time.
Flacks explained the Linkr team is grateful for the input and opportunity to improve the experience based on real needs of faculty, particularly as TIEC members in Texas and abroad represent an incredibly varied set of higher learning institutions from size to focus to approach.
What’s Next? A Bright Future for Virtual Exchange
Flacks and Kroman agree: the momentum behind VE is only building. Both see a trend toward institutionalization within higher ed for connected classrooms.
With good tools and support systems like TIEC’s, integrating global collaboration into the classroom is no longer a stretch—it’s increasingly seen as part of what rigorous, forward-looking institutions do. In Texas, the drive toward R1 status is pushing campuses to think more ambitiously about research, collaboration, and academic innovation. VE fits squarely into that vision as a way to enhance a student’s learning experience overall.
“I think the awareness that virtual exchange doesn't mean changing the entire course, but it allows you to enhance it, is growing,” said Flacks.
The key, they say, is finding champions—those faculty who are excited to experiment, build relationships, and try something new. And with the right tools and the right support, it’s becoming easier than ever to take that first step.
