Pandemic-the global spread of an initially local disease like COVID-19-bluntly forces us to stop. How do we respond in higher education to such stopping? Whether at the government level, for our universities, or in our classrooms, no existing playbook prescribes the pathway for dealing with a global pandemic of this magnitude, even now as we emerge from total lockdown to the potential for a new tomorrow. What we have done at this juncture is to capture anecdotal responses within and across countries that may highlight trends for later consideration. Unlike a globalised response that would adopt one approach internationally, our study considers adaptations for local differences in a glocalised set of responses in an attempt to identify new paradigms that reconceptualise not only

Given the impact of coronavirus, all schools across all sectors public and private, in the United Kingdom closed at the end of March 2020. Closures affected every type of establishment across the UK as well as private language schools. Our case study takes place in London and looks into the student experience in a language Mandarin Chinese school. These language students, as very many across the globe, who attended face-to-face sessions up until that point, have since been studying remotely and joining virtual classrooms via Zoom, one of the multiple video conferencing platforms available. To better evaluate students’ online learning experience of remote learning, this study examines the teacher-student interactions that take place via online means and the students’ sense of ‘presence’ (i.e., cognitive, social, and teaching presence) in order to evaluate the lessons we can learn from the online learning experience, going forward in terms of teaching and learning. This study also presents how meaningful and worthwhile the experience has been and how the sense of ‘presence’ plays a significant role in the process of online teaching and learning.

This study aims to determine students' motivation towards Mandarin learning during COVID-19. Theoretically, motivation is considered a broad concept that aims to define why people decide to do something, how long they sustain the activity, and how much effort they will expend to pursue it. Considering that there is no single theory that can comprehensively cover the possible motives, this study investigates the L2 motivation with the self as its core, which is found closely related to three motivation frameworks: Socio-education theory, self-determination theory, and L2 motivational self-system. This study found that L2 learners of Mandarin were highly driven by intrinsic motivation such as knowledge, culture, language learning stimulation, and accomplishment. They were less likely to be motivated by external pressures such as the ought-to L2 self or introjected opinions and showed a highly self-decisive multilingual profile with a willingness to diversify their knowledge and skills. Finally, Mandarin learning had positively contributed to their overall well-being during COVID-19.

The accelerated development of new technologies profoundly affects human society, offering many facilities of rapid communication but also generating challenges (Szabo, 2021).This phenomenon ‘has led to the rapid accrual of academic work mapping potential links between time spent on digital screens and well-being outcomes’ (Orben, 2020). Following close behind, there has been ‘a rise in systematic reviews and meta-analyses examining the impact of digital technology use’ (Orben, 2020). Our issue looks into media and technology trends in different contexts.