Our training team

Rita Koris – Budapest Business University

Rita Koris (PhD) is an associate professor at Budapest Business University, Hungary.

She has been a co-trainer with UNICollaboration for a number of years specialising in helping university educators in their academic development to learn how to develop and implement virtual exchange projects in HEIs.

Rita speaks Hungarian and English.

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Ana Beaven - University of Bologna

Ana Beaven teaches English at the University of Bologna Language Centre.

She has been a trainer with UNICollaboration for many years and currently also acts as a Training officer for the organisation.

She speaks English, Italian, French and Spanish

Shannon Sauro - University of Maryland

Shannon Sauro (PhD), is the current President of UNICollaboration and a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA) in the program for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).

She speaks English, German and Swedish.

Mirjam Hauck - Open University

Dr. Mirjam Hauck is Academic Lead for AI in Learning, Teaching and Assessment at the Open University/UK and a Senior Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy and  is a founder member of UNICollaboration.org and one of the senior trainers.

Mirjam speaks German, English and French.

Lorenza Bacino - Communications, UNICollaboration

Lorenza Bacino has been part of the UNICollaboration team since the Erasmus Plus Virtual Exchange project funded by the European Commission between 2018 to the end of 2020 and currently acts as the Communications Coordinator.

She speaks English, Italian and French and very bad Dutch!

Sara Pittarello - Managing Director UNICollaboration

Sara Pittarello currently serves UNICollaboration as Managing Director and Project Manager. 

She recently contributed to Outreach and Monitoring & Evaluation activities in the framework of Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (E+VE) for UNICollaboration.


She speaks Italian, English, German and Portuguese.

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Francesca Helm - University of Padua

Francesca Helm (PhD) is associate professor of English at the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padova.

She is research officer for UNICollaboration.

Francesca speaks English and Italian

Malgorzata Kurek - Jan Dlugosz University

Malgorzata (Gosia) Kurek, PhD is University Professor at the Institute of Linguistics at Jan Dlugosz University, Czestochowa, Poland.

She currently serves as the Training Coordinator for UNICollaboration.

Gosia speaks English and Polish

Sarah Guth - University of Padua

Sarah Guth is the Vice President of UNICollaboration, and teaches English as a foreign language at the University of Padua (Italy).

She also acts as Training officer for UNICollaboration.

Sarah speaks English and Italian

Teresa Calderón - University of Valladolid

Teresa Calderón Quindós, is Doctor in English Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Valladolid (UVa), Spain.

She undertakes Training in Spanish with our Latin American and Spanish partners.


She speaks Spanish and English

Teresa Mackinnon - Open Educator

Teresa Mckinnon is a former French teacher at the university of Warwick, a current open educator, and award winning language teacher with a wealth of expertise in online delivery and virtual exchange.

She has a special interest in Open Badges and gives talks about this for UNICollaboration’s training courses.

Teresa speaks English and French

Müge Satar - Newcastle University

Dr. Müge Satar is Director for Global at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK.

She is a Senior Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy.

She is the second publications officer of UNICollaboration, co-editor of the Journal of Virtual Exchange.

She speaks English and Turkish.

Rita Koris

Rita has been working in Higher Education since 2009 and teaches courses on management and business in the English-medium instruction programme.

She has been involved in various international collaboration/virtual exchange projects in the
past decade with European and US partner universities and is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to VE as she enjoys experimenting with new teaching methods and  new tools and technology in the classroom.Her main areas of research include teacher professionalism and teacher competences. ORCID profile is here.

Ana Beaven

Ana has a PhD in Applied linguistics from the University of Warwick, and her main areas of interest are Intercultural language education, the use of technology in the language classroom, and Virtual Exchange.

She has held Professional Development workshops on Internationalisation at Home, as well as on Virtual Exchange design and implementation. Ana was part of the FRAMES and GO-DIJIP European projects for UNICollaboration and is also a trained dialogue facilitator with Soliya.

Shannon Sauro

Shannon is a specialist in technologically-mediated language teaching and learning and an experienced practitioner and researcher of virtual exchange. 

She has over 10 years of experience incorporating virtual exchange in her teaching training courses in both Sweden and the United States and has carried out online training for university administrators and faculty on the use of virtual exchange across a wide range of disciplines.

More information can be found regarding her research and teaching on her Google Scholar Profile and Professional Website

Mirjam Hauck

Mirjam has written numerous articles and book chapters on the use of technologies for  the teaching and learning of languages and cultures, especially in virtual exchange/COIL contexts in particular. 

Currently her scholarly work focuses on theorising and framing the nascent field of critical virtual exchange (CVE). This field of research takes the fact that VE is not inherently equitable and inclusive as its point of departure.  

Dr Hauck presents regularly at conferences, seminars, and workshops worldwide. She is the President of the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL), and as such, serves as Associate Editor of the CALL Journal. In addition to this, she  is a member of the editorial board of ReCALL and LLT

She was a co-investigator in the EU-funded VAMOS, EVOLVE and ERASMUS PLUS Virtual Exchange projects and projects funded by the US-based Stevens Initiative. These projects  explore the  reasons for marginalisation and underrepresentation in global VE projects.

Lorenza Bacino

Lorenza is a Soliya-trained online dialogue facilitator, and has since joined the UNICollaboration training team because she believes in the power of virtual exchange for intercultural communication. 

Her background includes being a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) in Italy, France and Australia before embarking on a communications graduate diploma and becoming a broadcast journalist with Radio Netherlands, the Dutch International Service. During her time at the radio, Lorenza worked on an international rolling news and current affairs programme as well as making a number of in-depth radio documentaries.

She currently uses her journalism background to interview practitioners and participants of virtual exchange, keeping UNICollaboration’s Blog and Youtube channel updated.

Sara Pittarello

Sara is Expert in EU Higher Education and Training projects and has been a tutor of expert evaluators since 2020.  In addition to her work with UNICollaboration, she also collaborates with UNIMED as an external consultant.

Sara has also been co-tutor of the eTandem E+VE project of the Padova University Language Centre. She worked for the University Padua International Relations Office for 10 years as project manager and advisor in their EU programmes and initiatives.

Francesca Helm - University of Padua

Francesca was chair of the Education Innovation working group of the Coimbra Group of universities from 2018-2021. Her research has focused on language, intercultural learning and dialogue through virtual exchange, and she has been closely involved in policy advocacy and research. This has entailed above all, coordinating the monitoring and evaluation of the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange pilot project, which she also did within the Coimbra Group. 

She has carried out professional development on virtual exchange with a focus on internationalisation at home, intercultural awareness and  institutional policy and has published widely on virtual exchange and internationalisation of education. And her most recent work on Intercultural Communication in Virtual Exchange was for Cambridge University Press. 

See her Orcid profile here.

Malgorzata Kurek

Gosia is a researcher, teacher trainer and experienced VE practitioner. Her research interests include teacher education, task-supported language learning, CALL and multiliteracies. 

Her principal research addresses various aspects of Virtual Exchange, especially in the context of teacher education and teacher professional development. She is an author of several publications in the field of CALL and VE and has been a Trainer with UNICollaboration for a number of years. 

ORCID profile is here.

Sarah Guth

Earlier in her career, Sarah focused on investigating the use of technologies for the learning and teaching of languages and cultures. This interest led her subsequently to engage with Telecollaboration/COIL and virtual exchange beyond the foreign language classroom in the early 2000s.

A number of years ago, Sarah returned to the US for a year with her family, and worked as programme coordinator at the Center for Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) at the State University of New York (SUNY). During this time, she designed their original professional development programme.

Between 2018-2020 and now back in Italy, she acted as project manager for UNICollaboration during the pilot project Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange led by the European Commission. Currently, Sarah sits as a member of the boards of UNICollaboration, COIL Connect and IVEC (International Virtual Exchange Consortium).

Her current focus is on professional development in VE and VE integration into internationalisation-at-home strategies.

Teresa Calderón - University of Valladolid

Teresa has more than 25 years of experience in the Erasmus programme and has participated in virtual training with Latin American and EU universities in Erasmus+ Projects such as EVALUATE, REC-MAT and VAMOS. 

Her research interests began in Cognitive Poetics and in 2005 her work was awarded the National Prize in Applied Linguistics by AESLA. Currently, she focuses on issues related to education, such as bilingual education and interlingual education in vulnerable social contexts. 

After having gained experience in the School Deans’ Office for 5 years, she was recently appointed Dean of the UVa School of Education and Social Work.

Teresa Mckinnon

Teresa is an open educator, an award winning language teacher with a wealth of expertise in online delivery. She is very experienced in education management and course design in secondary and higher education, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Certified Member of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). 

Teresa has extensive experience of the integration of computer-mediated communication in learning design. She retired in January 2021 from her post as Associate Professor at the University of Warwick but remains active online as @WarwickLanguage where she enjoys connecting educators internationally across sectors. She advocates open educational practice, leads ALT’s Open Education Special Interest Group and is active in the

areas of virtual exchange and open badges.

ORCID profile. can be seen here

Personal website.

Müge Satar

In the department of Applied Linguistics, Müge supervises PhD students and teaches masters level courses, such as technology-enhanced language learning, materials design, and online language teaching, which incorporate a virtual exchange element. 

She is particularly interested in communicative and pedagogical aspects of online multimodal interaction, focusing on concepts such as social presence, meaning-making, interculturality, digital literacy, and instruction giving. 

In 2020, she hosted the International Virtual Exchange Conference (IVEC), and was the editor of the book ‘Virtual exchange: towards digital equity in internationalisation’. 

She has given numerous talks at conferences, workshops, and seminars worldwide, and written many book chapters and journal articles. 

Currently, she is part of a consortium funded by the US-based Steven Initiative investigating marginalisation and underrepresentation in VE. She is the Principal Investigator (coordinator) of the ENACT project https://enacteuropa.com/ co-funded by the European Union, one of the aims of which is to investigate how an online app for language learning through culture can be implemented in virtual exchange