This paper examines international students’ intercultural experiences during an online course on global media education that was co-organised in 2021 and 2022 by universities in Lapland, Finland and Hong Kong, China. The COVID-19 pandemic started an exponential ascent for teaching and learning in online environments. This is likely to continue in the globalising post-pandemic world, in which the participants are becoming increasingly international and from diverse backgrounds. For positive online intercultural encounters, online pedagogies that enhance intercultural understanding and the development of intercultural communication skills are needed. Through a content analysis of the students’ learning diaries, this paper investigates the ways in which cultural diversity was experienced during online teaching and learning and how the students’ perceptions and cultural sensitivity developed during the courses. The findings are reflected in the five pillars of the online pedagogical framework, which is then expanded to encompass the dimension of intercultural communication to support the development of intercultural sensitivity and interrelationships among students. We propose a pedagogical model for online teaching and learning in intercultural contexts that can support equity and quality in e-learning, or so-called e-quality. This paper concludes by recommending international collaborative teaching in authentic situations for the promotion of intercultural understanding and communication. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Cantonese Jyutping romanization is indispensable for effective teaching of Chinese as a second language in Hong Kong, a predominantly Cantonese-speaking city. Jyutping functions both as an auxiliary system that allows non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) students to read and write Cantonese words without knowing the characters, and a convenient way to input Chinese characters on digital devices. This chapter outlines the course structure of a 13-week intervention program that aims at teaching Jyutping typing to NCS students in Hong Kong. The intervention program was run three times, and the design was modified after each test-run to work around different pedagogical and linguistic issues. After the first intervention, hands-on typing sessions were added to every meeting, and the teaching order of Jyutping elements and teaching plans were also adjusted. These changes improved the overall effectiveness of the intervention. Two error analyses from post-tests of the second and third interventions show that the onsets z- and c- are the most problematic elements to NCS students. Our experience demonstrates how Jyutping can be integrated successfully into the broader Chinese curriculum. Copyright © 2019 selection and editorial matter, John C. Wakefield; individual chapters, the contributors.