This paper presents a collaborative autoethnographic study by two German lecturers at the University of Auckland on the development of their (partially joint) course design and teaching during the pandemic. With an abrupt change to online teaching within one week in March 2020, we had to redesign our language acquisition courses. Starting off as emergency remote online teaching, we had to include online students in New Zealand and from overseas, and in the second phase of the pandemic, these courses had to be readapted as dual delivery for on-campus students and remote domestic and overseas students. Different models for dual delivery emerged while we also had to redesign our beginner's course as a blended-learning course in order to rationalize our teaching as a direct viability result of the pandemic. We rapidly noticed that an even higher language learner autonomy was required for any of these arrangements than for normal on-campus teaching. Remote and blended students needed more assistance, more (online) engagement, more pastoral care, and more access to suitable online learning technologies.
In our study, we examined four German language courses at three proficiency levels and compared the constant adaptation of courses and ways of teaching. Within this teaching context, we mainly focused on investigating inclusion in a spatial sense. We enquired how we constantly adapted our course design and pastoral care to best cater to the different needs of (increasingly autonomous) learners in physical and virtual learning environments in different time zones who are enrolled in the same course.
We conducted a collaborative autoethnography to investigate the (joint) development of inclusive courses for dual and remote delivery while fostering students´ autonomous (online) learning skills. Collective or collaborative ethnographies are increasingly being used to reflect on emergency online teaching experiences during the pandemic (Jung et al. 2021) or to critically study the impact of COVID-19 on online learning experiences from cross-cultural perspectives (Wilson et al. 2020).
Our personal experiences in the same language program across different courses are the main data sources. We collected data such as personal memoirs, hand notes, reflections, and our e-mail exchanges as a critically reflective way to interrogate our experiences. Then, we used two cycles of coding to analyze and interpret the data into emerging themes to better understand the development of our course design and instructional practices to increase inclusive learning opportunities within an autonomous learning framework. Through our collaboration were able to create a collective interpretation of our data. Initial results indicate that different factors influenced our course design and teaching approaches that allowed for different ways of place-specific inclusion.
Jung, I., Omori, S., Dawson, W. P., Yamaguchi, T., & Lee, S. J. (2021). Faculty as reflective practitioners in emergency online teaching: An autoethnography. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 18(30).
Wilson Wilson, S., Tan, S., Knox, M., Ong, A., Crawford, J., & Rudolph, J. (2020). Enabling cross-cultural student voice during COVID-19: A collective autoethnography. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 17(5).
