Virtual Café: Equitizing Online Learning within Active and Meaningful Community of Learning in the EFL Content Subjects

Abstract

Emergency remote learning has led students and teachers to interact in distance by the involvement of media, platforms and learning strategies within a full virtual learning community. This study aims to investigate community of online learning in the E-learning class and how this can humanise the online learning. There are 26 students of Post-Graduate Program of a teacher training University in Bali involved in this mixed methods study. The data were gathered from Virtual Café using observation checklist and an interview guide. The checklist for observation was developed in three aspects of Community of Inquiry; Cognitive Presence, Teaching Presence, and Social Presence. Those presences are identified as quantitative data which then supported by an interview that combined 6 aspects of Humanising Online Learning; a liquid syllabus, adaptive teaching, visual and dynamic homepage, asynchronous video communications, asynchronous video discussions, and wisdom wall as qualitative data. The study revealed that students’ posts and comments are categorised into life experiences, interests, and trending issues which lead them to have a community of online learning and feel humanised. The use of Virtual Café has facilitated the students to learn comfortably by not feeling left out in the content subject virtual class since it keeps engaging them to participate in interesting ways while being humane. This study implies that active, effective, and humanised online learning can be optimally carried out by considering all learning aspects as one community within humanised learning ecosystem.