Private online channels and student-centred interaction

Abstract

In 2020, online teaching became mandatory at our institution, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts (UAS), Northwestern Switzerland, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As lecturers of English for Professional and Academic Purposes at the School of Engineering, we faced the challenge of adapting our heavily interaction-and group-work based language courses for an emergency remote teaching setting (Hodges et al., 2020). As regards technological measures, the UAS chose to supplement our traditional learning management system (LMS), Moodle, with web-conferencing software, WebEx and Zoom. However, despite our initial relief to still be able to teach, some drawbacks associated with the use of these conferencing tools quickly surfaced. Spoken or written interactions were lost when WebEx or Zoom sessions were closed or the internet connection was lost. Furthermore, due to the technical affordances of WebEx and Zoom, our sessions tended to be teacher-centred in the sense that they were always started by teachers, and it appeared that no spontaneous student-student interactions took place. In fact, as far as we could see, whether student-student interactions were to occur was entirely dependent on what group work teachers had planned for a particular lesson. Ironically, we found the use of electronic media for online content delivery, instead of making teaching and learning more individualised and learner-centred, brought us back to a challenge we had faced before Covid-19, namely the difficulty of facilitating meaningful student-student interactions inside and outside of class time. Interaction is key to learning, even more so