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This paper focuses on the impact of project BMELTET (Blending MOOCs - Massive Open Online Courses - into English Language Teacher Education with Telecollaboration), a virtual exchange (VE) (Helm, 2018; O’Dowd, 2021) involving pre-service English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers at Florida Universitària (FU), València and students on teacher education MA courses based in the UK and in China. Students from Coventry University (CU) and FU participated in BMELTET for four academic years, from 2017-2018 to 2020-2021 (Orsini-Jones & Cerveró-Carrascosa, 2019; Orsini-Jones et al., 2020; Orsini-Jones et al., 2021; Orsini-Jones et. al., 2022). In the last two iterations, 2019 and 2020, of this action-research project, CU and FU students were joined by Chinese students from two universities: Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in the third iteration and Sichuan International University (SISU) in the fourth one. The final iteration took place during the Covid-19 post-lockdown period in Spain the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in accordance with the restrictions in terms of class attendance at that time. This study explores the project’s participants’ perceptions of the impact of this VE on their pre-service teacher education and the competences that its implementation seems to have fostered for their future practice. This study will focus on the learning experience of the participants based in Spain.
The singularity of this experience lies in the integration of an ‘off the shelf’ MOOC which guides the flipped pedagogical nature of the students’ and teachers’ interactions in their co-construction of pre-service teachers’ (PST) teaching knowledge, as demonstrated in previous accounts of the project (Orsini-Jones & Cerveró-Carrascosa, 2019; Orsini-Jones et al., 2020; Orsini-Jones et al., 2021). The learning environment and organisation of tasks and activities have evolved over the years from an asynchronous Moodle-based platform to support the interaction to synchronous, Zoom-based exchanges (https://www.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/) and focus group interviews. The data emerging over the years would appear to indicate that participants felt that BMELTET helped them develop their teaching and learning competences. In particular, it was found that graduate students from Spain who had previously taken part in BMELTET and were now in-service teachers during the Covid 19 lockdown, were more at ease with the remote teaching mode that they had to implement than their peers who had not participated in the project. Moreover, it was found that BMELTET had been as an inspiration for these graduates and had motivated them to undertake similar activities in their own teaching practice, such as engaging in eTwinning or Erasmus VE projects. Such findings are in line with related research (Dooly & Sadler, 2020). Additionally, most participants (who were L2 – second language – English in the majority) felt that they had benefited from the opportunity offered by BMELTET to practise English meaningfully and to develop their intercultural awareness, sharing ELT knowledge and practice from different parts of the globe.