During COVID-19, online collaboration became more accessible than before, enabling
higher education students and teachers to organize virtual mobility experiments and
run projects with stakeholders across cultures. In this paper, we focus on three blended
intensive programs, two in Finland and one in Hungary, to explore how the pedagogical
approach of project-based digital storytelling combined with reflective writing contributed
to students’ sustainability competence development during the pandemic and after.
In these programs, multicultural teams of students worked on real-life digital storytelling
projects aimed at driving sustainable changes in people’s thinking, behaviour, and
lifestyles. Digital storytelling has proved effective in fostering students’ 21st
century skills through engagement and co-creation with the wider world. Based on qualitative
content analysis of 67 semi-structured learning journals, we explore students' developments
in values-thinking, collaborative, and self-awareness competences during their digital
storytelling projects. With insights from student reflections on their virtual, online,
and blended learning, we discuss challenges and successes of project-based, collaborative,
and reflective learning and propose best practices for using collaborative digital
storytelling as a transformative method to foster sustainability competences across
cultures.
