Online English Language Teaching in the University of Maroua during the COVID-19 Lockdown: Exploring Platforms and Interaction

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lockdown was imposed on Cameroon in 2019. During the period of the lockdown, the University of Maroua enforced online teaching. The aim of this paper is to examine how English Language courses were taught online in the Department of English Language and Literature in the Faculty of Arts, Letters and Social Sciences. The objectives are twofold. Firstly, to examine the platforms used for lectures during the confinement and secondly, to investigate interaction patterns employed for online teaching. Data for the study was collected from students and lecturers through convenient sampling technique in the 2019-2021 academic year. Only lecturers and students who actively took part in online pedagogy during the COVID-19 lockdown were involved in the study. The researcher exerted participant observation, 30 screenshots of online teaching, interview with lecturers and 102 copies of a questionnaire administered to Level One and Master’s One students. Results show that three platforms were used: WhatsApp (100%), Google classroom (88.76%) and zoom (56.75%). With regard to the method employed in teaching, interaction with the use of text and voice was done on the platforms, especially WhatsApp. The interaction was between Lecturer – learners, human – machine (screen) and Learner – Learner. Lecturers equally placed electronic material such as course synopsis and books on the WhatsApp and Google classroom platforms for students to exploit. The findings of this study offer vigorous acumens to higher education stake holders in Cameroon on the implementation of online teaching and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in teaching. The researcher recommends incessant training for lecturers and students so that they can copiously grasp online pedagogy and go global with ICTs, especially Artificial intelligence (AI) which is one of the fastest growing Information Technologies.