Although learning is most effective when students are actively involved in a dialogic co-construction of meaning (Wells & Arauz, 2006) and the more students talk, discuss, and argue, the better they learn (Bernard et al., 2009), investigators often demonstrate that student participation in university classroom dialogue is dominated by monologic teacher talk combined with brief student utterances (Wood et al., 2018) with little space for student active learning and engagement (Børte et al., 2020). Digital technologies are often seen as a way to enhance interaction (Englund et al., 2017), yet most reports show that the emergency remote teaching due to the COVID pandemic only worsened interaction in university lessons (Ferri et al., 2020). This study provides an in-depth view into interaction in synchronous online university lessons during the pandemic aiming to address the following question: How can practitioners at universities promote interactive online lessons?

In the thematic text to the ECER 2022 conference, EERA (2022) argues that the unprecedented actions resulting from the pandemic resulted in collective global solutions being applied to many challenges of the pandemic. These global solutions also lead to homogenization of educational practices and they will impact educational practices in the future globally. We believe that online teaching in higher education is one of the solutions with the pandemic serving as a catalyst making online mode the new “normal” of university teaching. Even though contact teaching at universities will gradually resume, we believe that online teaching will necessarily play an increasingly more important role in university education of the future. Therefore, we believe that results of our study are relevant to practitioners beyond emergency remote teaching as they concern any form of online teaching.

To address the research question, we employ a mixed-research design aiming to grasp the problematics of interaction in online university lessons from various angles and in great detail. We work with a dataset containing 18 recoded online lessons from 6 different university teachers supported by 4 in-depth interviews with the teachers. The data were collected through Fall semester of 20/21 to Fall semester of 21/22 at Masaryk University in Brno. The beginning of the data collection was marked by a transition from contact to fully online teaching. Data analysis consists of calculating the basic metrics of student engagement in the lessons – how many students talked at least once – and the duration of both student talk and teacher talk. Second, employing structured observations, we code discourse moves as outlined by Hardman’s (2015) study based on initiation, response, follow-up (IRF) structure into open, closed, check, and student questions constituting initiation moves; brief (one word, phrase, or sentence) and elaborate answers constituting response moves; acknowledgement (verbally acknowledging or repeating an answer), praise (praising student’s answer), negation (disagreeing or rejecting an answer), comment (building on or elaborating an answer), probe (asking the same student to elaborate or justify previous answer), and uptake (incorporating previous answer into a new question for everyone) constituting follow-up moves. We visualize interaction patterns in the individual lessons as social networks consisting of actors (teacher and students) and links between the actors (discourse moves) in ggraph (Pedersen, 2021) enabling us to see which students engaged in which forms of interaction with whom and intuitively shows around which actors the interaction was centered. Finally, employing inductive open coding for interviews with the teachers, we identify themes related to interaction in online teaching and synthetize results from the quantitative part with teachers’ perceptions of online teaching.

• The notion of online teaching being a substitute for on-site teaching is detrimental to interactive online lessons. Teachers who saw online teaching as a substitute did not employ pedagogical practices necessary for online classes. Instead, they relied on pedagogical practices they employed during contact teaching, which limited their ability to promote interactive lessons as oftentimes these practices were just not effective in online setting. It is natural that when people find themselves in situations they had not experienced before, they transfer practices from situations they are familiar with. However, online teaching must be seen as a different practice requiring different methods and failing to acquire this view may result in inability to attain the expected levels of interaction even for teachers otherwise skilled in promoting student talk during contact teaching. • New technologies and software are important, but useless if the most basic tools are not utilized. Even though some teachers gained knowledge of more advanced ways they could promote interactive lessons (e.g. breakout rooms, online collaborative spaces…), when they did not utilize the most basic ones (e.g. web cameras), the effect did not come. • Giving teachers clear instructions on what they can demand from students during online teaching is crucial, especially in relation to the problematics of students’ privacy. Confusion stemming from unclear legal situation concerning how deep the university can penetrate students’ privacy to ensure smooth educational process resulted in the fear of potential persecutions on the teachers’ side and the teachers willingly backed down from what they considered effective pedagogical practices (e.g. demanding cameras on, giving students penalties when a student did not respond to questions, did not turn their camera on, and apparently was not present at online session) to avoid getting into ambiguous legal situations.

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