 My name is Joan O'Sullivan and I'm the coordinator of the MA Instructured PhD at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick. Thanks for taking part, Joan. Can I start by asking you about what the overall approach has been in your institution to the pandemic? Thanks Peter, thanks for the opportunity to talk about our programme. So the MA in Applied Linguistics has actually been online since 2015 when the programme was launched. So we've actually been offering a very flexible professional development programme for language teachers and language professionals since then and in particular English language teachers who make up a large part of our cohort. So our structure enables teachers to continue working while they're studying if they want to and that's really helpful not only from their financial point of view but because they can bring insights from their practice to their study programme as well. So it's working really well and that element of flexibility is really great. So we offer blended and fully online programmes. Can you tell us a bit more about the structure of that and the intensity of it and the kind of duration? Absolutely. So I'm just going to share some slides here. The structure is, I suppose the main thing is that you can complete the programme within one calendar year. So if you started in September 2021 you could complete it by September 2022 but there's also an option to postpone your dissertation or to take an extra semester to do your dissertation. So again if you started in September 2021 you would have completed the taught programme by summer 2022 and then you could take the autumn semester to do your 20,000 word dissertation and this doesn't cost you anything extra. So I know in a lot of cases, especially with English language teachers, the summer can be a particularly busy time so it gives you the option of taking a bit longer to complete it. So typically with the MA there are three 12 week semesters so semesters one and two each have four taught modules and I'll talk a little bit more about those in a minute. So semester three is dedicated to the 20,000 word dissertation which can be on a topic of your own choice obviously so it gives you the opportunity and to research something that you're really interested in and it could be something classroom based or not. So the three semesters as I said can be taken back to back in one calendar year September to August using the summer period for the dissertation or the course can be taken over one and a half years as I said using autumn for the for the dissertation and we also have part time options and they can be so the modules can be spread over two or three years and just on our structured PhD then you have the option of transferring from the MA if you meet certain criteria to the structured PhD without doing the MA dissertation. So if people are interested in hearing more about that you can see our web websites there and you can get in contact with me through that. Okay, that's great. And of course you'd be at the conference as well and if anybody wants to catch you there in the in the lunchtime breakout, breakout slots and ask you all the hard questions then. Okay. Absolutely. And just to talk a little bit here about the course content. So we have, as I said, we have to two semesters so in the first semester we do cover the core features of language so we go into in depth into grammar vocabulary and phonetics and we also have a research methods module. We have an academic writing module which looks at the, you know, the structure of academic writing on a lexical and grammatical basis. And you have a choice of electives then from sociolinguistics looking at language and society, second language acquisition and classroom and learner discourse where you can analyze interactions in the classroom. And then in the second semester we have approaches to language and context so looking at different ways that you can analyze language and context. We have an issues in applied linguistic series which I'll tell you a bit more about in a minute. A follow up then on the research methods, and we have a really interesting choice of electives so we have corpus linguistics and language teaching and corpus linguistics is really strong in Mary Immaculate College. So this module is really directed at language teachers so how you can use corpus linguistics to help in the classroom so in teaching English language. We have a more in depth module on phonetics and phonology, and then discourse and pragmatic so looking at analyzing meaning and context. So that's it in a nutshell. Brilliant. And this can be delivered 100% online if necessary. Although you'd normally obviously try to meet people in person for some of us. It's great if people can come to the college at some stage but we have had students because we have students from all over the world. There have been students that have never actually set foot on the college. We also have a, I suppose, we have an international lecturer profile so we have contributors from people like Professor Michael McCarty Geraldine Mark who you. I'm sure a lot of English language teachers will be familiar with from the publications that you can see here English grammar today, English vocabulary and use the touchstone series, and so on and also Anno Keith and Geraldine Mark were the main researchers in the English grammar profile which looks at how learners at what stages learners are actually using particular items like what stage they might use the present perfect and aligned with the the sepher levels. That sounds great. What kind of time commitment do you think people are working part time and doing this? Should they consider if they're thinking about doing that course online with you? Yeah, I mean people have been able to do it while working full time. No, it's tough. Some people have tried to reduce their hours, particularly at, I suppose, specific times when it gets quite busy. It's something that I'd be very happy to chat to people about if they want to discuss their individual, you know, schedule and that so I can talk to people about that. Yeah. Okay, that's right. And so my last question then is about why are you supporting the ELT Ireland conference? I think three years in a row now that you have been doing it, but as we turn online, what can you tell us about that? Well, I suppose we've always had a strong relationship with the ELT Ireland. It's just a wonderful organization and I know it promotes professional development and has always endorsed our programs. And we have some of our PhD students have been very involved in the ELT Ireland. So we've actually held the ELT ed talks in Mary Immaculate College and that really provided with great synergy there. I think it was really enjoyable and it was great to have so many people taking part in that. And just one other thing I want to say is we have an issues and applied linguistic series, which we make it's actually one of our modules, which I think I mentioned earlier. It's a series of lectures on key debates in applied linguistics, and we try to match it to the interests of our students and because a lot of our students are English language teachers, a lot of the topics are very relevant to English language teachers. So we make this publicly available and both the actual live sessions and the recordings we had Steve Walsh talking about classroom interactional competence in an online environment. Last week, we're going to have a talk on the sefer next week and we have language or sorry, the identity of language teachers as well so topics that are very relevant for English language teachers. Thank you.