The situation caused by coronavirus disease 2019 closures in the spring of 2020 resulted in various restrictions for universities and led to a reorganisation of their operations. This created unprecedented challenges for all academic work. This study aimed to analyse the pandemic-related work experiences of doctoral researchers from several…

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of online synchronous and asynchronous teaching formats for undergraduate physiology education in a medical program in Ireland, with a specific focus on the use of LabTutor (Lt) LabStation online laboratory platform for remote access. To understand how the Lt platform was used by students and whether…

In the context of Virtual Exchange (VE) it is often assumed that participants will be naturally prepared to interact online successfully with their international partners. However, there is ample evidence in the literature to suggest that VE participants are usually unaware of effective communicative strategies in synchronous and asynchronous…

With the initial COVID-19 lockdown of March 2020 in Ireland, many modules in university programmes that were designed to be delivered face-to-face were suddenly switched to remote delivery. The difficulty for both lecturers and students in replicating face-to-face interaction and the frequent lack of lecturers' visibility of students' work in such…

This paper, as part of a European Commission-funded project entitled REBEL (Repurposing Education through Blended Learning), deconstructs school communities understanding of the challenges and opportunities for blended learning in the school sector in Ireland with perceptions shaped by experiences of enforced school closures during the pandemic.…

In Ireland, as around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) adopt innovative approaches to ensure the continuity of placement-related components of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes. One post-primary concurrent ITE programme conceptualised and developed the Teaching Online Programme (TOP),…

Background: A plethora of new terms and digital pedagogies have been making recent headlines in higher education with the promise, or threat, that digital technology will revolutionise the way in which universities operate. Blended learning is part of this digital revolution and institutions of higher education worldwide are increasingly adopting…

In increasingly online higher education environments, instructors must develop positive and community-oriented learning environments, equivalent to, if different from, face-to-face learning experiences. Connectivism and communities of inquiry are complementary theories that facilitate the design and development of online learning and enable online…

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 forced Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to quickly reimagine and rethink how lectures and tutorials would continue, how students would be assessed and progressed and how standards would be maintained. This paper focuses on the pedagogical lessons learned from the online pivot in 2020 and how…

Virtual exchanges (VEs) based on synchronous video communication allow learners to benefit from online intercultural experiences with a high degree of interactivity (Wang, 2004). Video conferencing tools allow synchronous audio-visual and non-verbal communication as in Face-To-Face (FTF) situations (Kock, 2005), although synchronous video…

This paper reports on two distinct models of telecollaboration--the Soliya Connect Program, a synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) project, and the Intercultural Franco-Irish Exchange, an asynchronous CMC project--which seek to provide students with a learning space to promote a more politically engaged and reflective pedagogy…

The UK Open University has a large, highly distributed workforce, particularly within its part-time teaching staff who work mainly from home and who live across the UK and Ireland. In these circumstances it is a challenge to provide professional development which allows for situated learning, peer interaction and community building. In this paper…

In this paper, we investigate whether trainee teachers' practices, with respect to multimodal feedback, differ from current research, and to what extent it may affect students' language development. More specifically, the goal of the present study is threefold: (1) it observes how trainee teachers responded, whether synchronously, asynchronously,…

This study investigates the different learning opportunities enabled by text-based and video-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) from an interactionist perspective. Six Chinese-speaking learners of English and six English-speaking learners of Chinese were paired up as tandem (reciprocal) learning dyads. Each dyad participated…

E-learning has become one of the biggest phenomena of educational literature in recent years. Although the potential promise of e-learning is often expected within the process of learning, much of the emphasis is in fact on the electronic issues to facilitate learning, with little regard for its consequences on the learning process. Surprising,…