Students' Interaction in Breakout Rooms

Interaction between students is widely regarded as being beneficial and even influential towards learning and creating opportunities for learning. Many previous studies have highlighted the importance of student-student interaction in the traditional face-to-face classroom. However, since the onset of COVID-19, there has been a shift to synchronous online learning (SOL): a context in which little is yet known about the role of interaction. Student-student interaction has become more difficult to promote, given the constraints of working through VLEs such as Zoom. The aim of this research is to investigate whether students and teachers believe that students' interaction during SOL is beneficial or not, the challenges faced by teachers in creating space for students' interaction, why these challenges arise and how it could be solved by exploring the appropriate use of affordance and how can teachers make use of existing affordances to create space for effective learners' interaction. This study uses a qualitative methodology, adopting a focus group with 20 university students and teachers as well as an individual interview with the teachers and students to gain rich and in-depth data. The findings show that teachers and students have experienced many challenges during the emergency remote learning. The findings suggest that teachers require training to develop their teacher technological competence and their e-CIC to encourage effective learners' interaction in SOL.