Vivat academia, vivant professores! Challenges of teaching professional communication in foreign languages amidst global pandemic

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to challenges of transitioning the educational process to online learning. To present an objective analysis the authors have compared the experience of two Russian universities – MGIMO University and Samara National Research University in the field of foreign language teaching, in particular professional English. The focus of the paper is on difficulties faced by the faculty and the ways academics coped with them.The authors highlight the specificity and peculiarities of such a complicated form of education as distance e-learning. Comparative analysis of online platforms, which are mostly used for the organization of e-learning, reveals their benefits and major drawbacks. Furthermore, the authors reflect upon how learning material is blended and assimilated in order to form an e-course. As one of acute pressing problems, the complexity of students’ knowledge assessment is described. The goal of the paper predetermined the necessity to carry out a survey to accumulate and summarize data on teachers’ and students’ individual experiences of the newly formed online educational environment. As the survey indicates, both professors and students consider elearning to be a real breakthrough. On the other hand, the authors conclude that currently it can be only an alternative to the more traditional forms of education, since it can’t be relevantenough to teaching various aspects of professional communication at universities.