Reflections of EFL Instructors on a Six-Week Online Professional Development Course in the Work-From-Home Era

Abstract

This qualitative research aims to examine the experiences of Turkish EFL instructors affiliated with foreign language units in higher education context partaking in a six-week professional development course based on asynchronous distance learning. To that end, their posts on the platform, reader discussions, and assignments uploaded onto the system besides individual semi-structured interviews were exploited as data gathering tools. The results speak to the positive impression of online course takers in terms of establishing interpersonal synergy, providing personal gains, and promoting their content knowledge. Moreover, their post-training perspectives disclosed the support they sensed to need for professional and institutional issues. Though instructors detected some problems to be addressed in the course, their criticism functioned as suggestions to best shape similar further practices in addition to reforming the current training. Finally, some recommendations have been provided for scholars concentrating on studying within this field to shape their future directions.