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special attention on 50 + learners or learners from other vulnerable groups, how to
always have a plan B app or tool prepared in case the planned one doesn’t work as
expected and so on.

CREATIVITY
Also, creativity, in the same way , as in face to face classes, helped teachers adapt the
available digital resources and their use according to the learners needs or level of in-
terest and a lot of them say they had to be creative and change things during the les-
son.

THE RIGHT MINDSET
Last but not least, the conclusion was that having the right mindset focused on con-
stantly improving digital skills and use of online tools contributed a great deal towards
the good integration of the digital tools in their teaching. They understood that it im-
portant not only to show and explain the student how to use these digital tools but
also to be facilitator and sometime leave the students be in control and that requires
the teacher / facilitator to be confident with the use of online apps and tools so they
could easily navigate, change settings and roles in the app they are working in.

PROFESSIONAL ENGAGEMENT TO MOTIVATE LEARNERS
Other skills the Romanian experts have identified as being important in maintaining
educational motivation and engaging vulnerable students are good communication
skills, and the ability to listen carefully and actively to their needs so teachers know
better how to encourage or use different relaxation techniques in order to ease vul-
nerable students anxiety, or using humour for example or showing personal vulnera-
bility as teachers. All these create a more humanistic approach in a class that is facili-
tated in an online digital environment.
In order to be successful, the teachers discovered that the learners are a great re-
source for developing new digital skills and a good opportunity to start to learn new
applications transforming student’s technological skills in a new teaching method and
content or in creating new digital content. This last part can also be translated into
professional engagement and motivation for the 5 expert teachers.

THE FLIPPED CLASSROOM
In terms of using flipped classroom methodologies in online teaching the interviews
with the experts showed mixed opinions about how effectively these can be applied to
general adult online classes. Motivating adult students to learn autonomously depends
on the learners’ life context and situation and the learning objective. For example, in
language courses for companies, it is difficult to motivate learners to spend more time
at home for self-study so teachers have to adapt and integrate little self-study bits into
the actual online course. The main reason for the lack of learners’ interest for auton-
omous learning is mainly the lack of time and not so much with the lack of interest.
However, research showed that adapting the autonomous learning tasks to the learn-
ers’ specific interest and needs helps a great deal in motivating them and also integrat-