Different terms have been employed to refer to the practice of telecollaboration. Whereas for the purpose of our projects we have adopted the term telecollaboration, it is important to mention other nomenclatures that can be found in the literature, and to identify the salient differences between the terms.

The reference to telecollaboration as a teaching practice began to emerge in education in the mid-1990s together with the advent of the first major commercial Internet Service Providers and the proliferation of emailing systems. Emails allowed educators to conceptualize new opportunities of connecting language learners with native speakers and other language learners around the world. The publicly available World Wide Web made it possible to bring into the classroom authentic foreign materials and enabled students to develop and publish online their own materials individually or with others. In the late 1990s, the term telecollaboration came to define and formalize the practice of using new technologies to institutionalize class-to-class global collaborations. The proceedings of the Hawai’i Symposium in 1996 and the special issue of the Language Learning and Technology publication in May 2003 were devoted to this new educational practice, and they provided an arena for practitioners to start exploring the use of telecollaboration as a method to enhance language learning and cultural studies.

With the advent of emails, the term e-pals became diffused referring to the new variant of pen pals made possible through the exchange of emails versus the traditional pen-and-paper approach (O’Dowd, 2016). The ePals Global Learning Community remains today one of the largest online communities of K-12 educators, including millions of students and teachers in over 200 countries. Acknowledging the new forms of online collaboration other than email that are made possible today by new technology, ePals has been partnering with companies in educational technology and beyond to provide a variety of cloud-based collaboration features within its platform in addition to email.

Whereas telecollaboration tends to refer to a formal class-to-class activity led by the instructor, E-tandem (online tandem learning) refers to a form of telecollaboration that is classroom-independent, and which generally takes places as a noninstitutionalized bi-literal configuration. Thorne (2005) elaborates that e-tandem projects are based on the concept of reciprocity and learner autonomy, as they are set up in a student-to-student model, where learning activities are not mediated by the teacher and take place independently of classroom activities (p. 5). In a traditional e-tandem exchange, learning activities tend to be negotiated directly by the learners, who are responsible for scheduling and organizing the interactions with their partners, and negotiating discussion topics. E-tandem projects generally aim to enhance the language learning experience rather than placing the focus on intercultural studies; partners are native speakers of the reciprocal target language, who are interested in learning each other’s language and responsible for providing each other feedback on language use (O’Rourke, 2005, p. 434). In language education, opportunities for E-tandem language exchange are provided for example by The Mixxer, a site for language learners hosted by Dickinson College, where language learners and teachers can locate potential native speakers to function as language partners in a e-tandem bilingual exchange setting. Another platform that promotes this type of telecollaboration is WeSpeke, a social network for language learning, where language learners can partner with others in a tandem language exchange using text/audio/video-chat tools.

Telecollaboration is also sometimes referred to as virtual exchange. As discussed by O’Dowd (2016) virtual exchange is the term preferred for example by the Virtual Exchange Coalition, a community of telecollaboration practitioners, which aims to promote a generative ecosystem for telecollaboration projects seen specifically as a way to prepare, deepen, and enhance students’ experiences during study abroad contexts (“Virtual Exchange Coalition”, 2017).

More recently, other denominations have become favored alternatives to telecollaboration. In promoting the term Internet-Mediated Intercultural Foreign Language Education (ICFLE) Thorne and Belz (as cited in O’Dowd, 2016, p. 6) argue that the terms above do not place emphasis on the crucial intercultural objective of modern language pedagogy, and that the other terminologies do not reflect a practice specific to language education per se, because they are also applied to other disciplines. O’Dowd (2007, 2016) promotes the adoption of Online Intercultural Exchange (OIE) as an umbrella term to be used across disciplines, which is sufficiently comprehensive in all relevant aspects and variants of online communicative and collaborative learning initiatives. These latter two definitions also aim not to limit telecollaboration to a specific modality (such as the e-pals or e-tandem labels tend to do), or to an institutionalized partnership between two classes like in the case of telecollaboration; rather to encompass the more extended approaches to telecollaborative projects as seen above, which take place in multilateral, multilingual, and multimodal settings.

It is relevant to mention also another label that has recently emerged in the field of telecollaboration, Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), which refers to telecollaboration initiatives conducted within the SUNY group of universities in the United States and their partners abroad. The mission of COIL@SUNY is to develop online and hybrid courses with international dimensions, which includes the implementation of international telecollaborations and partnerships.