ABSTRACT
Default positions and decisions are those taken automatically, without consideration or awareness of other choices or options. As such, they are normalized as best practices, prevailing wisdom, or simply the intractable way things are. Defaults in education reflect values that are often unexamined until a crisis brings them to the surface. The sudden closure of campus buildings in March 2020 was such an event because it changed the default mode of teaching in the Intensive English Program where this chapter is set from face-to-face to online. Initially, online teaching attempted to recreate the in-person classroom on virtual platforms, with fully synchronous teaching. As the severity and duration of the pandemic became clear, certain default positions of established online teaching practices were adopted, including asynchronous components and a modular learning management system (LMS). However, these defaults, too, did not always align with the pedagogy and purpose of instruction in academic English. This chapter documents ways in which the program struggled with, challenged, and eventually redefined the default settings of both online learning and English for Academic Purposes teaching itself. This period of enforced self-reflection and program revision shifted defaults including the presumed benefits of classroom instruction and the preference for asynchronous over synchronous online teaching.
