Multiple online environments as complex systems: Toward an orchestration of environments

International audienceDistance learning, telecollaboration, and virtual exchange rely more and more on multiple onlineenvironments. Research on how teachers and learners deal with this is rare. The present study considersfuture teachers designing online tasks for actual learners in a telecollaborative project deployed acrossthree online platforms. Framed by dynamic and complex systems theory, our study draws oncomputer-mediated discourse analysis, multimodal conversation analysis, and content analysis tounderstand through which affordances pedagogical actions such as instruction giving and providingfeedback are accomplished throughout the three environments. Analysis highlights different strategies foreach pedagogical regulation. Our main finding is that the presence of different environments emerges asan affordance for teachers to distribute pedagogical actions across the system of environments, which wecall orchestration of environments. We discuss the implications of this finding for models of teachercompetence and for teacher education