English language teaching in higher education during Covid-19 – British Council Turkey – Watch the recording

Overview

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt the world, academics and university leaders have to make major adjustments to their teaching approaches and decisions. What are the challenges and solutions for the fall semester and beyond? What quality assurance and teacher support systems should we employ in online and remote teaching?

On 27 October the wonderful British Council Turkey team hosted their bi-monthly Higher Education event with a panel discussion among language and digital learning specialists who looked at the latest developments in language higher education institutions in Turkey and the UK. I had the pleasure to be one of the panellists who – alongside Dr. Bahar Gün, Conrad Heyns, Dr. Bilal Kırkıcı and moderator Ayşen Güven – discussed questions submitted before and during the forum by the 350 educators who attended the event. You can read more about my co-panellists biodatas on the British Council website. 

Here are the questions we discussed:

• What are the learning points that can take institutions from emergency remote teaching to high-quality remote teaching of English in pre and in-sessional courses? 
• How can we increase learner motivation in online education?
• Is online teaching less engaging than face-to-face teaching, and if so, what can be done to improve the situation?
• What are the current institutional reflections on quality assurance systems that can support high-quality online teaching of English? 
• What teacher support systems are needed to facilitate remote teaching? 
• What is the ideal percentage of synchronous/ asynchronous online classes? 
• How did students respond to learning English online? 
• Which language skills are the most difficult to teach online?
• What are some common misconceptions educators have about online teaching and learning?
• What has this pandemic caused in English language education? 

The recording

Watch the recording for some insightful comments about student & teacher engagement, teacher education and quality assurance made by my co-panellists. It is about 60-minute long but it is worth every minute 🙂

Summary of my contribution

I talked about students’ motivation, quality online learning as well as what support academics and administrators need to move remote teaching to the next level. If you can’t watch the recording at the moment, here is a brief summary of the points I raised.

• Emergency remote teaching (ERT) proved to be an excellent response to the crisis given the circumstances; academics, institutions and managers did exceptionally well, diving in uncharted waters, moving their courses online and providing continuity for their students. Despite the daunting challenges they had to deal with, educators joined forces and embraced change, showing amazing potential and resilience. 
• The institutions that were quick to bring in the expertise i.e. employ digital learning specialists, educational technologists and instructional designers, were ahead of the game. Those who relied on DIY approaches had to face and are still facing significant issues. 
• The challenge that is ahead of us is bridging the gap between emergency remote teaching and sustainable online learning. ERT may have been an excellent solution over the first phase of the pandemic but there have been issues with the pedagogy, teachers’ and managers’ workload as well as students’ learning.
• To bridge the two we need to redesign the learning experience according to how people learn online. It is not enough to just digitise a face-to-face pedagogy and move it onto an online platform. We need to change key elements in the design, development, and delivery of online courses. And we need assessments that will reflect these changes. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts or magic solutions.
• It is not just about training the teacher to teach online. It is also about training the student to learn online. Just because they are fluent users of technology doesn’t mean that it is not a steep learning curve for them as well. They need support and a new set of literacies. But we cannot expect the teachers (and the managers) to take on this responsibility if they have not been properly trained. This is another reason why DIY approaches do not work in the long run. They treat symptoms, not problems and cannot provide the support that key stakeholders really need. 
• Finally, I invited the participants to use critical thinking when they consume content related to online teaching. The high demand for online learning has resulted in an abundance of webinars, resources and technologies but not all of them are pedagogically informed or principled. This can make emergency remote teaching more unsustainable for institutions; it can also lead to cognitive overload and negative learning experiences for students.

Sophia Mavridi is a Digital Learning Specialist & Lecturer in English Language Teaching at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. She holds an MA in Educational Technology & TESOL and she’s a doctoral researcher in Technology Enhanced Learning with Lancaster University. Her research focuses on online learning and the increasingly important role of digital literacies in education. Sophia supports institutions and teachers to integrate technology in a pedagogically sound way and has trained for major organisations such as the British Council, International House, Macmillan Education and many more. She is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences and the joint-coordinator of the IATEFL Learning Technologies Special Interest Group; her latest co-edited volumes are ‘English for 21st Century Skills’ (Express Publishing, 2020) and ‘Digital Innovations and Research in Language Learning’ (IATEFL, 2020), both of which reflect her keen interest in innovative pedagogies in language education.

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If you want to refer to this post please link directly or cite as follows:

Mavridi, S. (2020). English language teaching in higher education during Covid-19 – British Council Turkey – Watch the recording [blogpost]. Digital Pedagogy. Retrieved from https://sophiamavridi.com/english-language…ch-the-recording/ ‎

If you wish to refer to the recording, please cite as follows:

British Council Turkey (2020). Higher Education Talks 2: English language teaching in higher education under Covid-19 circumstances. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/P6XqB8sH6_o