With the rapid development of technology for the past decades, online instruction has emerged as an alternative mode of teaching and learning and a substantial supplement to traditional teaching. At the Center for Foreign Languages, Can Tho University, online teaching has been growing recently, particularly due to many schools’ closures because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This small-scale study was conducted with a group of online teachers of English of the Center for Foreign Languages with the aim to understand the teachers’ challenges as well as their opportunities to develop online courses. The results revealed that the primary challenge of online teaching was about technology impacts on both teachers and learners. There were also suggestions for both administrators and teachers for enhancing quality of online teaching.

The existence of inconsistencies between teachers’ practices and learners’ preferences for feedback in pronunciation arise in a not greatly effective teaching and learning environment. The current study attempts to address this gap by examining the students’ perceptions of corrective feedback (CF) and the alignments between students’ preferences and teachers’ practices on CF for pronunciation in an EFL context, namely Vietnamese high school education. To this end, a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were used as the research tools to gather data. The study highlighted the students’ positive perceptions about the values of teachers’ CF for their pronunciation development. In addition, both teachers and students share similarities in the values of students’ responsibility for error correction and segmental features as a choice of corrected errors and teachers as a source of CF. However, the mismatches between students’ preferences and teachers’ practices far outweighed the matches indicated a big challenge for teachers to develop problem-solving strategies. The implications for practical applications of teachers’ CF strategies are also presented.

Online education is a revolutionary trend of educational technology today, particularly, since the Covid-19 pandemic, online classes have become the cornerstone of modern education. The rapid growth of online learning is challenging the relevance of traditional higher education systems. Although many efforts from educational institutions to promote online teaching and learning have rapidly increased, progress is far from sufficient, especially when a model of an online learning system needs further examination in practice after the pandemic. This chapter reports a case study at the center of foreign languages in Vietnam, addressing the need to develop an online learning ecosystem during the pandemic crisis and beyond. Characteristics of an online learning ecosystem are presented and basic steps of developing an online ecosystem for English teaching and learning are discussed in detail. The suggested ecosystem should cover the five key components including teaching environment, relationships between teachers and learners and between learners and learners, teaching methods, teaching content and resources, and teaching evaluation. Several recommendations for strengthening an online learning ecosystem are also presented.

Online learning has experienced rapid growth recently, particularly due to many schools’ closures because of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the number of online learners is steadily growing, retaining learners in online courses and programs has posed a challenge. Retention rates are vital data that is indicative of an institution’s ability to engage learners in their learning, satisfy their educational needs, and prevent them from dropping out. With the aim to explore possible reasons why learners drop out in their online learning and identify effective ways to improve learner retention, this study examines 164 online learners at a center of foreign languages through an online survey. The findings indicate that online learning is still a revolutionary trend of education and learner retention rates have been positive in most online courses. Practical recommendations are included so that institutions can use these results immediately to impact their policies and practices.