Introduction to the Special Issue Emergency Remote Teaching, Online Instruction, and the Community: Lessons from the COVID-19 Crisis in Language Education

The COVID-19 crisis took all of us by surprise. Universities and schools, in unprecedented fashion, quickly began to move instruction online. In some universities, the switch to online instruction coincided with spring breaks, allowing instructors a brief period for hurried preparation, whereas other colleagues had only a few hours’ warning. In any case, few educators had previous experience with online instruction, so most were suddenly asked to teach in a completely new way. Despite these new challenges and the isolation necessitated by COVID-19, the language teaching community, in addition to adapting or creating courses for online delivery, was quick to share tips and best practices, publish case studies of ways programs navigated the move online, and conduct research that studied aspects of the pandemic’s impact on our field.