The COVID-19 pandemic has called for a shift in the teaching and learning landscape from conventional classes to e-learning. This propels the use of a range of online learning and distance learning platforms massively, notably MS Teams, Zoom US, and Google Classroom. However, the fact that the aforementioned require a monetary subscription to unlock their full potential proves detrimental to the accessibility to education during the pandemic, i.e., not all students and/ or educational institutions have the available means. This paper thus seeks to affirm the capability of Discord as an alternative online learning platform that is not only efficient in its own right but also comes at no expense. To this end, a handful of English teachers who had been teaching online via either of the three platforms above were offered to switch to Discord for a fixed amount of time. They received instructions and support from the research team concerning the platform along the way and were asked to participate in a survey afterward. With the use of SPSS for statistical data analysis, the paper pointed out that Discord achieved a high compatibility level for both parties in use, namely the teachers and the students.

IELTS is popular in Vietnam thanks to its reliability and applicability. Writing task 2 has been acknowledged to be the most challenging for IELTS learners. However, in Vietnam, not much research has attempted to investigate in an in-depth manner as to what are the problems, causes, and consequently the suggestions of such a notion. The research hence aims to investigate the phenomenon in a more thorough, empirical manner. To this end, the study employed the participation of 205 IELTS learners from two language centers in Ho Chi Minh city to provide their opinions regarding the problems, causes, and recommendations deemed the most pressing, acute, and beneficial, respectively. With convenience sampling and survey being the chosen research design, the research was quantitative in nature, producing numerical data as a result. Further analysis conducted via comparing the means of the items listed in the questionnaire yielded based on the IELTS band descriptors managed to discover a series of problems, causes, and suggestions considered the most relevant to the Vietnamese learners concerning IELTS writing task 2. The research thus served as the basis for teachers and learners of IELTS writing task 2 to identify the recurrent issues and provide relatable approaches.