Richárd said that sometimes he had to decide not to include certain websites in his seminars because they were simply too complicated to use, as he put it, “I sometimes feel that the webpages I find should involve some users in testing their services, and they shouldn’t entirely follow the logic of IT specialists […], the user shouldn’t be expected to figure out what the programmer had in mind when designing the software”. Evelyn said that most LMS platforms had student or staff profiles only, and she as an instructor had to ask for a student to show her how assignments could be turned in in Microsoft Teams because another student had approached her with a problem regarding this procedure.

Some instructors also encountered problems in the implementation of technology inclusive classes. Éva and László, who instruct transversal ICT courses, said that many times their problem was that certain webpages are only available in English and some of their students could not use them because of the language barrier. Magdolna and Éva, who instruct part-time courses as well, said that part-timers often found it hard to digest the content of ICT courses because they tend to display more limited levels of digital competences, furthermore, their classes were offered in blocking, which added to the difficulty of internalising the course content effectively. Finally, participants made references to their regular students voicing that they had too many different digital environments to monitor (e.g., the LMS system, quiz websites, document storage websites, or even more LMS systems each preferred by different instructors). According to Dóra, getting used to different systems routinely should be no excuse for limiting oneself to one well-known choice, as she put it, “I think it’s a life skill to adapt [to various platforms], just like someone knows which seminar room to go to”.

 

Albert and Erika frequently asked their students to watch TED videos, but Evelyn said that in-class videos should not be longer than five minutes because they could rather be useful for sparkling discussion. Longer videos with worksheets or the interactive worksheets provided by TED-Ed could be ideal for homework, the topic of which could be discussed in the following class. Dóra, Erika and Albert sometimes asked his students to listen to free online podcasts and Albert also preferred BBC Radio 3’s radio essays (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x3hl).

Éva, Erika, Richárd and Dóra liked using LearningApps in the instruction of their learners because many different tools suitable for learning and teaching are collected there, and in Éva’s experience, learners liked websites that collect and offer several useful features at the same time. Éva added that sometimes she perceived her learners liked LearningApps partly because of their unwillingness to discover even more tools presumably more suitable for their learning or teaching needs. Dóra’s principle was that in her methodology classes, learners should list some digital possibilities they had already been familiar with, and their task was to develop activities trying out different tools which were designed for the same purposes (e.g., a different quiz or crossword making tool). This way learners could discover alternatives and compare the pros and cons of each. Dóra’s aim was to broaden her learners’ technological repertoire and to make them reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of different tools originally designed for the same purposes which could contribute to more sound pedagogical reasoning when choosing one instead of the other; thus, choice was not simply based on familiarity with the tool.

Research activities that combine multiple technologies were also frequently mentioned by the participants. Erika and Éva sometimes asked their learners to research certain topic for a couple of minutes as conversation starters. Albert sometimes asked students to write short news on anything that could be connected to the topic of the classes and display it using Padlet. In one of his courses, László dedicated five classes to teach his learners about how to conduct research while referring to several reference websites or repositories that were trustworthy and offered quality references such as Google Scholar or JSTOR. The steps were topic selection, source localisation and source use, developing research questions and planning the research project.

Projects and portfolios were also frequently used by several participants because they require using multiple technological tools. In one of his essay writing classes, Zsombor used a Google Drive-based process writing approach. Students worked on developing one essay throughout the entire semester while learning about the features of GoogleDocs as well as learning about reference websites (such as Google Scholar or JSTOR), monolingual dictionaries, collocation dictionaries and thesaurus tools. Zsombor, Albert and Evelyn said that they liked using those tools that require or enable Google account logins because in their experience, every student had a Google account. Kálmán and Erzsébet also taught academic writing courses. Erzsébet found it important to teach her learners about the dangers of paraphrasing websites and through experimenting with paraphrasing, the learners’ academic writing skills were also developed, mainly criticality, research ethics and paraphrasing. Erzsébet, Zsombor and Kálmán taught students how to use the MLA and APA referencing styles. Apart from manual use, Zsombor taught students how to use citation assistants such as Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/) for collecting and organising sources used in one’s research project. Zsombor added that once he showed the tool to colleagues too, but besides initial interest, none of them ended up adapting the program for their own purposes.

Dóra, Magdolna, Albert and Richárd used portfolio approaches. During ICT methodology courses, learners met several digital possibilities and tools, and at the end of this process, they were required to collect and organise the documents (such as reflections, activity plans, website or tools analysis, mini research projects) in one edited document. Richárd and Albert explained to their learners why it was important to have the skills to bind several files into one final Word or PDF document because they said this was typical of project, e-portfolio, and application websites these days. They also said it was important for 21st century digital citizens to understand and be able to alter materials following the given rules of uploading documents such as document format, file size, or joint or separate documents.

For speaking and presentation skills development, Dóra sometimes required her students to design narrated PPT presentations, and Erika asked them to record conversations. Narrated PPTs; that is, presentations with accompanying video or sound, were ideal because they developed learners’ presentation techniques (both designing slides and preparing for delivering the presentation). To avoid using the same templates repeatedly, Erika encouraged her students to use Slidesgo, and Richárd introduced them to Slides Carnival (https://www.slidescarnival.com/) from where they could download stylish templates. For in-class presentations, Albert used Classroomscreen (https://classroomscreen.com/) a countdown timer tool that helped learners keep to the time limit of the presentations.

Finally, the participants discussed what web tools or applications they liked using for creating quizzes or online tests. Dóra said that she liked using alternatives to Kahoot! because in her experience most students at her university were “fed up with” it. Erika liked using GoogleForms for quick tests. Albert had experiences with UniPoll (https://www.unipoll.hu/), the official testing extension of Neptun, the most frequently used LMS system in Hungarian university programmes, but he mentioned using Redmenta as well. Richárd used testing solutions offered by LMS systems such as Edmodo or Moodle. These tests, before the pandemic, were mainly used by Richárd as mock tests or as a tool to provide feedback on how much learners internalised from the course material.

 

In her language development classes, Erika liked asking learners to record their conversations. She designed proficiency speaking exam exercises and pairs of students had to discuss them as a mock exam. She then listened to the recordings, provided feedback on them, and deleted the recordings. In one of his language development classes Richárd asked students to place the links to their favourite songs in an online music album and write a rationale why they had chosen that song. Richárd perceived that the students enjoyed this creative spin on developing their written argumentation skills. In one of his classes, Kálmán taught his students about words and expressions in connection with finances using the browser-based financial game, Spent (http://playspent.org/html/), in which players get a starting $1,000 and have to navigate through a month keeping their balance with new challenges they meet every day.

Erzsébet and Zsombor teach academic writing, and Gábor teaches academic writing and translation studies subjects. They all found it very important to introduce students to reliable online sources such as Google Scholar and JSTOR. Erzsébet also taught her learners about Sketch Engine (https://www.sketchengine.eu/), a tool that analyses texts and decides which phrases were very typical, recently emerging, or unusual in their texts, suitable for checking the quality of academic English texts the learners write. With a similar rationale, Erzsébet also taught learners about two more technological tools that can contribute to their writing skills development, Coh-Metrix (cohesion and coherence metrics – http://www.cohmetrix.com/) and LexTutor (https://www.lextutor.ca/). Moreover, Erzsébet utilised Google Cloud’s Speech-to-Text dictation extension (https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/) an AI speech recognition tool suitable for practicing pronunciation. If learners pronounce words close to a native pronunciation, the AI recognises them and spells them correctly. The same function is unlimitedly available in Microsoft Word (Office-365 version) in eight languages (https://insider.office.com/nl-nl/blog/dictation-available-in-more-languages), one of them is English.

 

The slow skills transformation from ordinary to digital study skills signals how time-consuming and how much experience-related digital competence development initiatives prove to be (Pelgrum & Anderson, 2001; Voogt & Pelgrum, 2005). As technology is best linked to one’s field of expertise (Graham et al., 2012; Tsai & Chai, 2012), students sometimes face the need to operate and use multiple platforms. While ICT courses offering hands-on trial opportunities and the teachers’ reflectivity on their own teaching processes are evidently helpful, in the case of part-timers, classes in blocking seem less ideal for direct digital skills development if they overburden learners. An ideal solution would be (as suggested by some participants) to conduct needs analysis and coach learners through learning about new technologies project-based, with a focus on offering alternatives to traditional practices. Such alternatives are (for example, but not only) substituting:

A final rationale voiced by the participants regarding the importance of changing instructors’ beliefs about the strong need for technology inclusive education as part of face-to-face education is the growing presence of digital tools in students’ lives from an early age (EU 2015; 2016). These include filling out digital forms, using the client gate, accessing their banking system, applying for universities and grants. Further to these, digital language proficiency examinations have also been on the rise even before the Covid pandemic required exam organisers to expand this possibility to allow for distant examinations. All these point towards the need to include sufficient reflectivity and hands-on trial experiences with various forms of technologies related to each subdiscipline.