Out of the Comfort Zone: The Trouble with a MOOC-Virtual Exchange Blend at the Time of the COVID 19 Pandemic

This work reports on BMELTEVEP (Blending MOOCs into English Language Teacher Education with Virtual Exchange during a Pandemic), a virtual exchange (VE) project carried out between March and April 2021, with students and staff based in three Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), two in the Global South (Brazil and Sri Lanka) and one in the Global North (UK). Participants were involved in the Third Space created through the VE project, engaging with each other synchronously online and also asynchronously with a global English Language Teaching (ELT) community of practice of over 200,000 participants on a MOOC. The main aims of the project were: to provide students in English language teacher education with different perspectives on ELT; to debunk the myth of the ‘native speaker’ and decolonise ELT; to foster metareflection on online learning and teaching ‘in action’, while engaging with the synchronous sessions on the VE, ‘on action’ after having carried out the tasks with the partners and ‘for action’, applying the lessons learnt to their future teaching practice; to foster the acquisition of digital critical literacy and the development of intercultural awareness. The study will discuss the troublesome knowledge emerging from this project and compare it with the results from related pre-pandemic work.