From emergency remote teaching to sustainable online education

With COVID-19 forcing schools and institutions to move their classrooms online, a new approach to education has emerged; that of emergency remote teaching (ERT). This quick transition out of the physical classroom and into the virtual one has presented most educators with both opportunities and challenges, not least of which was familiarising themselves with technologies, adapting their courses to remote delivery, and maintaining continuity for their students. Recent research on a sample of 1.146 language educators who applied ERT (Mavridi, 2020) suggests that, despite the overwhelming constraints, educators stepped out of their comfort zones and remained dedicated to supporting students’ academic goals. ERT proved to be a good response to the crisis but there are concerns that, in the long run, it may not be pedagogically sustainable.

Keeping the lessons learned from the initial phases of the crisis in mind, this plenary will argue that institutions should now move away from emergency solutions to more sustainable ones. The following questions will be addressed: How can we redesign the learning experience according to sound, tested and inclusive online pedagogies? What does this paradigm shift involve? What are the practical and pedagogical considerations for the language teacher, teacher trainer and manager?

Presenter:
Sophia Mavridi is a digital learning specialist and a lecturer in English currently working at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. Her research focuses on e-learning and the increasingly important role of digital literacies in education. She has worked as a primary & secondary school EFL teacher, Director of Studies and Cambridge examiner and has trained for the British Council, Macmillan Education, International House and many more. She is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences and the Joint Coordinator of the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG. 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.