Managing activity transitions in robot-mediated hybrid language classrooms

Virtual exchange (VE) projects in pre-service language teacher education are increasingly being recognized as an innovative practice due to their affordances for providing teacher learning opportunities in technology-rich environments. This study aims to report these opportunities based on results from a VE project consisting of diverse teacher education activities, including lectures, webinars, asynchronous tasks, and synchronous video-mediated interactions. This project provides a medium for pre-service teachers to collaboratively design a lesson to be implemented in hybrid language learning environments. We specifically deal with the video-mediated interactions of the transnational groups of pre-service language teachers using multimodal conversation analysis (CA) as the research methodology and investigate VE phases to explore how their interactions become consequential for the final pedagogical design. The findings show that the pre-service teachers retrospectively orient to shared practices in the earlier phases of the VE project, and the deployment of retrospective orientation as an interactional resource creates interactional space for collaborative decision-making related to their pedagogical designs. We argue that tracking the video-mediated pedagogical interactions of the pre-service teachers using CA is a methodological innovation that allows researchers to collect interactional evidence for the emergent teacher learning opportunities. The findings bring new insights to the role of the technology-mediated settings (e.g. VEs and telecollaboration) in language learning, teaching, and teacher education and in bridging different cultures, curricula, and physical spaces.

In hybrid educational environments, the choice of technology can affect students’ interaction, inclusion, and learning. While videoconferencing programs such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams are used widely, they generally fall short of facilitating interaction before/after the class, limit remote students’ control over recipient selection, and tend to provide a low sense of perceived presence, among other limitations. Telepresence robots can take hybrid communication a step further by enabling navigation, providing autonomy, and allowing social interaction outside classroom. These robots, however, still require technical and design-related improvements to overcome their usability issues and be successfully implemented in schools and universities. The aim of this work is to explore the criteria that would make a telepresence robot more efficient in school settings. Thus, we explore what design and technical features of these robots can help or hinder interaction, inclusion, and participation of remote students in synchronous hybrid learning settings. Data were collected via interviews, observations, and video recordings of 221 participants during their interactions with or through different telepresence robots in both controlled lab settings and in-the-wild scenarios in Denmark, Italy, Cyprus, and Latvia. Our findings suggest that the design features of telepresence robots can impact students’ mediated communication, inclusion, and (dis)engagement in the classroom. Accordingly, we define a set of minimum requirements that a telepresence robot should meet to be able to be used as a tool to facilitate synchronous hybrid learning scenarios. These requirements are divided into five categories, namely audio/video communication, navigation, physical features, technical aspects, and costs. The results on robot affordances and specifications have implications for robot developers, as well as for educators and school administrators when selecting appropriate robots that address diverse student needs and purposes. The findings can also inform the development of training programs for educators on how to create learning activities that best suit hybrid contexts containing remote learners on telepresence robots.

Delay in L2 interaction in video-mediated environments in the context of virtual tandem language learning

Missing significant amounts of school during K-12 education is known to put students’ cognitive and social development at risk. Alternatives such as home instruction and online learning are common, but lack sufficient interaction with peers and teachers in the classroom. Mobile remote presence systems, or telepresence robots, are promising for homebound students because they provide embodiment and mobility in addition to the real-time participation offered by video conferencing technologies. Research is needed, however, to identify what actual benefits and challenges would be experienced by homebound students using telepresence robots in the K-12 classroom context. We present findings from four multi-week deployments with homebound K-12 students attending classes via telepresence robots. The homebound students’ experiences were documented in a total of 15 interviews and analyzed qualitatively as case studies. The homebound student participants and their deployment contexts differed from one another along multiple dimensions, and while some benefits of mobile remote attendance were enjoyed by all participants, each participant also experienced unique benefits. Challenges with hearing, seeing, and moving the robot around the classroom warranted improvements to the design of the telepresence system. Other challenges suggested priorities for managing a classroom deployment, such as ensuring that the remote student is included in classroom activities, accountable to the teacher, and treated with respect by classmates. Based on insights from the study, we make recommendations for real-world deployment procedures and design of future studies in similar contexts.

This study explores robotic telepresence in classrooms, from the perspectives of both the remote students (operators) and their in-person classmates. Analyzing a subset of field study data from 35 participants (22 operators, 13 classmates), we identified differing priorities: operators of the robot emphasize the need for improved functional aspects like camera control, while co-present classmates value social presence, interaction and identification, advocating for features like personalization and effective communication channels. These insights underline the need for telepresence robots that balance functional efficacy with social integration to provide a holistic educational experience. This work, though incomplete, enriches Group and CSCW literature on telepresence robots to facilitate collaborative interactions by highlighting the distinct needs of remote and in-person students, proposing design recommendations for telepresence robots that are technically proficient and socially responsive.

This paper aims to explore the factors that impact on rural and remote students' participation in higher education at university.The findings indicated that the students were familiar only with university scholarships, tertiary preparation program, and head start.Before admission, most students required information on pathways to university, admission requirements, scholarships, and range of courses and after admission they required information on academic support, tutorial assistance, library and IT services.This paper also suggests that universities need to evaluate the effectiveness of the services they offer to both attract and support rural and remote students to University if participation rates are to be raised.

This article explores how laughter is used in hybrid meetings to negotiate the shared meeting space between local and remote participants. We compare two datasets from organizations that use Microsoft Teams for either video-mediated interaction or audio-only interaction. By drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, we show how meeting participants initiate laughter either at or with the remote participant, thus subtly moving between multiple interactional spaces and shaping the participation framework of the meeting. By making the remote participant’s behavior or lack thereof (i.e. silence) noticeable and laughable, the participants collectively work to re-establish the shared meeting space. The study thus contributes to the discussion of the implications of visibility (or lack thereof) in hybrid audio-only and video-mediated meetings.

Telecollaboration in pre‐service teacher education promotes intercultural communicative competence and bridges knowledge and practice. Although a growing body of studies has addressed the affordances of telecollaboration for developing student‐teachers' (STs') competencies, research focusing on their knowledge of classroom interaction—and on multimodal aspects of classroom interaction in particular—is scarce. Using multimodal conversation analysis (MCA), we address this research gap by investigating the affordances of telecollaboration between STs in Sweden and Japan to notice multimodal aspects of language classroom interaction. The study comes from a “parallel‐course project” that aimed to design and conduct telecollaborative tasks within the context of two pre‐service English language teacher education courses in Sweden and Japan. The participants ( N = 12) met online and worked on video‐based tasks using authentic classroom videos. They were grouped to conduct four online sessions (202 min of screen recordings) for analyzing classroom videos and transcriptions. Using MCA, a collection of 51 cases where STs notice and discuss multimodal aspects of teaching was compiled. The findings show that this telecollaboration allowed the STs to notice multimodal aspects of language classroom interaction, including teachers' gestures, gaze, and facial expressions in Japanese and European contexts. We demonstrate that the tasks facilitate collaborative noticing, enactment, and functional description of pedagogical gestures. The tasks also allowed the STs to discuss similarities and differences between the pedagogical cultures, contributing to their awareness of classroom interactional competence. Our study addresses a methodological gap in telecollaboration research by employing MCA. Implications for telecollaboration and curricula in language teacher education, as well as for using conversation analysis as a research methodology, will be given.

Online courses have potential to reach broader audience when compared to traditional learning methods, as they can be made instantly available to groups of students dispersed over wide range of locations and time zones. Some learning topics are easily adopted to this online environment, while others may be challenging to implement as online courses due to their specific requirements and associated cost. If mastering certain topic requires hands-on experience then online course must be made interactive to match the experience of a traditional instructor-led class. Otherwise, online course will be perceived as unsatisfactory and lacking positive impact. Computer Aided Design (CAD) training requires both high performance Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and hands-on experience with specific CAD software. Both these requirements are difficult to meet on a remote student computer without additional cost. In this paper, grouping CAD workstations into cells is proposed in order to perform required graphics processing using existing hardware and software resources available in an average CAD laboratory. Proposed cell framework uses video capture and GPU hardware encoding to stream the content to the remote students while capturing their interactive feedback for the near real-time hands-on experience. The framework requires single capture card per cell and utilizes 20% of the resources for the cell overhead processing. Remaining 80% of workstations are fully available to the online students and instructors.

Just as there was a transition to remote teaching because of the COVID pandemic, many universities are in the process of transitioning back to in person classrooms. Case in point, Clinical Physiology I is the first semester of a 5000 level two‐semester course that is offered as a flipped class. Even with the transition to fully online teaching in the Spring of 2020, the robust breakout room feature of the video teleconferencing software, Zoom, permitted small group work that occurs with the flipped to continue.As the fall 2021 semester approached, the University approved a return to in person classes, however several students emailed the course instructor (L.C. Anderson) expressing concern and asking if an online option would be available. Students completed a pre‐class survey in which they committed to attend class in person or remotely via zoom. The instructor continued the flipped classroom with some students in small groups in person and some students in zoom breakout rooms. The students scored lower than expected on the first exam. Traditionally, the average of the first exam is approximately 80%, however the Fall 2021 Exam 1 average was 70%. Of 40 students, 13 scored less than 70%; this statistic was concerning given that students must earn a 70% to pass the course. To address the difficulty of the exam and to make sure students had learned the material, the course instructor flagged 13 questions (of 40 test questions total) with questionable testing statistics. Student submitted reflective essays on three of the exam questions but could write about all 13 questions for extra credit. From the student writings, the instructor ascertained that 3 of the test questions were flawed and all students were given credit for those 3 questions. Post exam reflections and adjustments raised the course average to 85%.Sensing continued anxiety within class, the instructor surveyed the students. The survey results suggested that remote students were less satisfied with class and perceived that they, as a group, had done poorly on the exam. Remote students reported feeling unfairly disadvantaged by the flipped classroom model online and reported a lack of trust in their online group members. This led the instructor to ask the questions: 1) Did the remote students score worse than the in‐person students? 2) If there is a performance difference, are there other factors that could explain the difference? In‐person students answered an average of 29.9 + 4.8 questions (about 75%) correctly whereas remote students answered an average of 25.7 + 5.8 (about 64%) correctly which was significantly different (Student’s T test, p=0.015). There was no significant difference between the performance of males and females, however BIPOC students averaged 23.6 + 6.0 with white students averaging 29.7 + 4.5 (Student's T Test, p= 0.001). This difference was lessened but persisted after the exam correction. This was an alarming observation; furthermore, more BIPOC students were participating remotely. The instructor invited students to meet one on one to review exam 1, added office hours and used student feedback to adjust class activities. The class performance improved on exam 2; furthermore, there were no significant differences between 1) in person versus remote students, 2) male versus female students and 3) BIPOC versus white students.

Taste is a central sense for humans and animals, and it has been largely studied either from physiological and neurological approaches or from socio-cultural ones. This paper adopts another view, focused on the activity of tasting rather than on the sense of taste, approached within the perspective of ethnomethodology and multimodal conversation analysis. This view addresses the activity of tasting as it is interactionally organized in specific social settings, observed in a naturalistic way, on the basis of video recordings. Focusing on video recorded improvised tastings of cheese in gourmet shop encounters, the paper offers a systematic analysis of the way in which tasting is orderly achieved in an intersubjective way. It follows the various steps characterizing tasting, from the invitation to taste, to the grasping of a bit to taste, which is put in the mouth, chewed, and swallowed; it details how an interactional moment offering the taster a priviledged, individual, focused space in which to devote exclusive attention to the object tasted is actively tailored by all parties. By contrast, the completion of tasting is marked by a return to mutual gaze, the animation of facial expressions and nods, and the final production of a judgment of taste. By offering a systematic reconstruction of how these tasting moments are organized, the paper invites to a multimodal approach of sensoriality in social interaction.

In group-to-group videoconferencing (VC), social actions are coordinated between participants in the physical and online environment, which raises the practical problem of how to manage the interactional space in a collaborative and inclusive manner. This can be particularly challenging for less experienced (i.e., novice) users of VC. The present study uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to investigate how university students, who speak English as a foreign language, organise their conduct in the moment-by-moment unfolding of VC. It focuses on moments that make additional interactional work to include the remote party salient, namely transitions regarding next-speaker selection and topic change. The analysis illustrates the reflexive use of different constellations of talk and screen-oriented behaviours as key for coordinating actions in the VC environment. The study has implications for educational research and practice, since it helps understand the interactional competence learners need to develop to succeed in environments of online collaborative work.

Leader identity has traditionally been associated with hierarchical position (formal leadership). Yet, while there is an increasing tendency to regard leadership as a collective and distributed process, very little is known about the interplay of formal and informal leadership as in situ social practice within a hierarchical context. Using video-recordings of naturally occurring workplace interaction as data and arguing that insights from applied linguistics can be profitably employed to address such a lacuna, we use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to show how ‘doing’ leadership is not limited to the formal leader. Rather, through talk, gaze, the use of space, artefacts and so on, it is negotiated in subtle ways which allow informal leadership to emerge in conjunction, and in this case in conflict, with formal leadership. We conclude this article by discussing the wider implications of these findings to both leadership theory and methodologies used to investigate the ‘just whatness’ of leadership.

This study investigates the multimodal construction of blame attributions in peer interaction during digital tasks in English as a Foreign Language classrooms. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (CA), we examine how the force of blamings is manifested in and through the variety of resources used, and the role of digital devices in the emergence and resolution of blaming sequences. The analysis shows that children’s blame attributions can be bold and involve a lamination of several multimodal resources, often without an explicit verbal formulation. Additionally, participants may build on the actions of the digital application to allocate blame, using the affordances of the technology to avoid direct verbal attributions. The study thus elaborates on the sequential structure of blamings and highlights their context-bound and multimodal nature. It contributes to research on multimodality in technology-supported classroom interactions, shedding light on the merging of the embodied and the digital in action formation.

Four of the nine big Technical Universities in Germany, together with Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, have developed a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the subject of Communication Acoustics. The idea is to foster education on the late Bachelor or early Master level by joining the expertise available at individual universities and by creating an online course offered both to local as well as remote students. The course started in winter term 2016 and is hosted on the EdX platform. It is offered in English language and roughly divided into two parts: The first part covers basics on acoustics, signal processing, human hearing, speech production, as well as electroacoustics and psychoacoustics. The second part introduces selected applications, such as sound recording and reproduction, sound fields and room acoustics, binaural technology, speech technology, as well as product sound design. The course material consists of explanatory videos and text as well as audiovisual material, exercises, and self-assessments. The final examination takes place as a written or online exam, with physical presence at the contributing sites. The talk will provide insights into the experiences we made, and illustrates how we overcame the obstacles inherent to cross-university education.