Emergency Remote Teaching Student Responses to Intensive versus Extensive Course Modalities during the Pandemic

Abstract

Covid-19 forced university language programs to reevaluate and revolutionize their teaching practices. While in the years preceding the pandemic, many administrators and practitioners were reluctant to embrace blended or fully online language courses, these teaching/learning modalities quickly became the “new normal”. To monitor the efficacy of the courses offered remotely during the 2020/21 academic year, the Language Center of Libera Università di Bolzano administered a series of surveys to students – in addition to the data we routinely collect by way of our “big data” approach to language curriculum monitoring. These courses were offered both in an “extensive” and an “intensive” format. The responses to the surveys – in combination with course enrollment, participation, and completion data – offer an opportunity to investigate students’ attitudes and behavior toward remote teaching and learning, but also to compare intensive language teaching and learning with extensive language teaching and learning, a topic which has not received sufficient attention in the literature to-date. Notwithstanding the well-documented challenges associated with “emergency remote teaching”, we observed many positive experiences and outcomes. Our data is being used to inform decisions regarding which courses will continue to be taught fully or partially online in the years to come.