COVID-19-Driven Sudden Shift to Remote Teaching: The Case of the Languages for the Community Program at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral

The Languages for the Community Program (LCP), one of the units that make up the Language Center at Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL), Santa Fe, República Argentina, is an extension service provided to people 17 years of age and older that live in Santa Fe or in neighboring towns, and to UNL students wishing to take language courses other than those offered in their own study programs. Since 1999 when they started, these language courses have been taught in a traditional face-to-face modality. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the way in which the first term in 2020 had to suddenly shift to remote teaching and how this shift was devised, coordinated, delivered, and evaluated in response to the unexpected context provoked by the outbreak of COVID-19. The chapter also reports the changes implemented during the second term according to the results of a satisfaction survey administered to students. Collaborative work, previous expertise, and methodological principles allowed the staff at LCP to offer a quality educational response to this paradigm shift in foreign language teaching and learning. [For the complete volume, "The World Universities' Response to COVID-19: Remote Online Language Teaching," see ED614006.]