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The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a myriad of changes to education systems throughout the world. Many educational institutions quickly made the decision to convert traditional face-to-face classes to remote ones (Hodges et al., 2020). Emergency remote learning became an option to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus (Murphy, 2020). On March 23, 2020, the Ministry of Education in Turkey switched to an emergency remote teaching supported by TRT (Turkish Radio and Television) and Education Information Network (EBA) for all K12 schools. Similarly, universities opted to proceed online for the entire semester by using video conferencing tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Adobe Connect, Google Hangouts, Cisco WebEx, or learning management systems (LMS) like Moodle, Blackboard, Itslearning, Canvas, Google Classroom, and so on. Therefore, video conferencing classes became the norm at many universities and educational institutions around the world as well as in Turkey.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, both students and teachers had to change their medium of teaching and learning, and due to the outbreak, they were forced to use video conferencing tools for all school subjects including language teaching and learning. In other words, these video conferencing tools became ‘the basic global mode of global delivery’ (Fatani, 2020, p. 2). Although this emergent solution had affordances accessing EFL education, it created complications such as technical issues, pedagogical concerns of EFL teachers, poor internet connection, and accessibility to resources, to name a few. Therefore, the investigation of EFL teachers’ perspectives on affordances of video conferencing tools is of utmost importance for enabling them to reflect on their teaching experiences and preparedness as well as their adaptation to the whole process. In addition to that, this study aims to provide implications in relation to the effectiveness of current video conferencing tools in online EFL teaching and EFL teachers’ continuing professional development. Therefore, the main issue addressed in this paper is the use of synchronous sessions and video conferencing tools in the Turkish EFL context. This study also aims to be useful for researchers who want to conduct studies on video conferencing in the future.
The aims of the study were to identify influential elements and their relationships in a video conferencing learning environment, as well as to investigate how the entire environment could be designed to improve learning experiences. As a result, the current study was carried out in order to gain insights into the following two questions:
- 1.
What are the affordances of the video conferencing tools desired by EFL teachers in Turkey?
- 2.
What implications does this study have for the efficiency and effectiveness of current video conferencing tools in online language teaching and EFL teachers’ continuing professional development?