Digital technologies have become a driver of change that exerts tremendous impact across the disciplines, including education. The Flipped classroom model, carried out in a technology-enhanced environment, has been proven to bring educational innovations.  However, in the Vietnamese educational context, the adoption of the flipped model in interpreting courses for undergraduate students has been hardly touched upon in the existing literature. This current study is, therefore, an attempt to examine English-majored students’ perceptions about this teaching model on Moodle Learning Management Platform and put forward some proposals in the design and implementation of the Flipped Interpreting course. The data were collected using both quantitative and qualitative methods, including a Likert-scale questionnaire and individual interviews. The results revealed that students had positive perceptions toward the adoption of Flipped model and Moodle platform. Analyzing the interconnection of three domains in CoI framework and the additional domain of Technology Use, the authors then offer further recommendations for effective implementation of the model in the EFL classroom context.

Peer assessment (PA) has become as an influential educational tool in higher education for many years. However, there is little evidence about technology-facilitated PA in the field of Translation. Therefore, this study attempts to fill in the gap in the literature with an aim to scrutinize the students’ perceptions and motivation toward the adoption of a five-week online PA activity in a Translation course. The correlation between students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and self-perceived skill enhancement is further explored.  In order to gather research data, thirty-six third-year students were asked to respond to two questionnaires about the perceptions and motivation of online PA in a five-point Likert-type scale. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze the collected data. A number of findings have been revealed by the end of the study. Firstly, the students exhibited a highly positive perception and a high level of motivation in participating in this online task. Secondly, throughout the activity, the participants valued intrinsic motivational factors more importantly than extrinsic ones. Thirdly, the findings highlighted that intrinsic motivation stood out to be the significant predictor of self-perceived translation skill improvement, whereas no statistically significant relationship between extrinsic motivation and a sense of skill enhancement suggested a negligible impact of external factors perceived by students. Potential implications for translation pedagogy and research are also included in the study. The results of this pioneering study, consequently, add to the scarce literature in the local translation landscape by proposing a possible alternative to the face-to-face peer assessment format as well as paving the way for future peer assessment practice and research in blended learning courses.

This study aimed to characterise academics’ conceptions of teaching in fully online undergraduate distance education courses with no on-campus component. The study aimed to fill a gap in the literature, as previous research had examined conceptions of teaching in face-to-face courses, with a few studies of blended teaching via the Internet in on-campus courses. Fourteen academics from five faculties in a Vietnamese regional university were interviewed, with the study taking place shortly after the outbreak of Covid-19. Grounded theory was used for data analysis. The results revealed four categories of conceptions of online teaching, namely online teaching (1) as transmitting structured knowledge and skills, (2) as guiding students to acquire knowledge and skills, (3) as facilitating students’ understanding via interaction and (4) as developing students’ understanding and capabilities. The four categories of conceptions were defined and distinguished by a set of six dimensions, which included e-Learning/LMS. The set of categories had some similarities to those found for face-to-face teaching, but also some distinctions which could be explained by the nature of online teaching and learning. The study, therefore, makes a major contribution by establishing a category scheme for conceptions of teaching in online distance education, with detailed characterisation of the four categories of conceptions. The descriptors of the conceptions showed cultural influences, particularly from a Confucian heritage, which is of significance as research into face-to-face conceptions had not found cultural variations.