Our Self-Access Experience in Times of COVID

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has without a doubt had an enormous impact on every possible way of our lives. We have felt its effects on an individual personal level and as family members, at work, as members of a community, and particularly as students and teachers. Even in institutions and departments such as ours where online education has been at the forefront of our work for years now, the challenge to survive a fully virtual new reality has left us with a lot of lessons learned and has opened doors to more opportunities for growth. For years now, the Language Department at ITESO has had its language courses in LMS platforms and has offered courses in blended and fully virtual options alongside face-to-face classes. In the English Certificate Programme, we have regular teletandem sessions with universities in other countries. The Language Hub, our self-access centre, offers writing support through an emailing writing desk service and we run virtual conversation clubs on Zoom alongside face-to-face sessions. We are certainly no strangers to online work, but up until now, that was just an option both students and teachers could consider. As of March, this year, our whole university had to move to online classes and the services of our self-access centre had to be adapted to virtual options as well. This report presents our answer to the questions posed by SISAL for this open call to the special issue on how we have lived the experience of self-access during the pandemic.