Online Teacher Roles and Competencies: Voices from Pre-Service EFL Teachers

Given the prevalence of COVID-19 pandemic and consequently the emergence ofmore online courses throughout the world, exploring teachers’ views about the shiftfrom face-to-face to online environments seems significant. The objective of thisstudy was thus twofold: (a) to investigate the roles EFL teachers take and (b) todetermine competencies required to teach online English language courses. Mixedmethodsresearch was conducted, and the participants were 100 MA students ofTEFL at Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST). The required datawere collected through administering two questionnaires, adapted by theresearchers, on online teacher roles and competencies along with two open-endedquestions. After carrying out descriptive statistics for the quantitative data andtheme-based analysis for the qualitative ones, the results indicated that onlineteaching roles could be hierarchically ranked as pedagogical, professional,administrative, social, assessment, technological, and researcher. With regard toonline teacher competencies, pedagogical, professional, and technological rolecompetencies received the highest mean, while the researcher role competenciesgained the lowest one. Pre-service EFL teachers held the view that havingknowledge of technology and its use, knowledge of course/content, ability tosustain learners motivation, online teaching skills, and ability to communicatewere other competencies teachers require to fulfill their roles in online Englishlanguage courses. The findings can provide more insights into how to redesign andmap online teacher professional development courses to better prepare potentialEFL teachers and boost their quality as online EFL teachers.