Reaching Out to Students Individually while Teaching Emergency Online Courses

This paper was originally conceived as an interactive workshop, based on the European Cinema Project (university course) taught from April to July, 2020, when it migrated online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The research aims to offer practical teaching suggestions, mainly to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instructors. The oral paper, intended for face-to-face presentation at the Teachers Helping Teachers (THT) International Seminar in Kyrgyzstan, ended up being adapted for online delivery live via a Zoom link instead. The workshop sought to provide useful signposts along the way to teaching better writing for students, addressing mainly how to set up and organize an online writing course, teach the language and structure of interpretive texts, and achieve the outcome of improved student writing as a product. The current paper focuses mainly on the first of those three aspects: teaching online in an emergency situation and giving students individual attention and feedback. The notion of an emergency online course differs markedly from that of a planned synchronous or asynchronous one (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust, & Bond, 2020). The sudden and unprecedented challenges ushered in by the Covid-19 pandemic only serve to exacerbate the headaches for instructors.