I do not have any experiences teaching online. However, in high school before the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to quickly transition to online learning, I was in an online French 12 course. I personally perceive my experience in this course differently compared to course at the end of high school and university that were online. This is primarily because courses that were online in 2020-2021 had to be online, but I (kind of) chose to take French 12 online in high school as it didn’t fit in my school time-table.
I took the French program through EBUS Academy and it was great. It was clearly outlined in ~12 units, and I knew exactly what I needed to do. This program however, was impacted by the pandemic and I was provided with the option to continue and increase my grades or just take the grade I currently had (which I chose to do). The benefits of learning French online was that I could work at my own pace and complete assignment when I had time to do so. The teacher would check in periodically, but as long as I completed it by the end of the school year, I was on my own. I really enjoyed the flexibility of it.
However, there were various downsides of taking a language course online. One major concern was that although I was reading and learning the language, there was not much opportunity to speak and interact with peers, which really hindered by ability to speak and understand French. To this day i can’t really speak French, but I am very good at reading and writing French. Another barrier was being unable to take a French course in university because although I could understand to a degree, much of what I had learned speaking and comprehension wise from grade 11 French was lost in grade 12 and therefore when I went to take French in semester 2 of my first year, it was a struggle and I quickly dropped the course.
Therefore, despite the flexibility of leaning French online, if French 12 fit into my schedule in high school, I definitely would have chosen that over taking it online. When in person, there is the opportunity to connect with classmates and practice actually using the language, which is less available online, unless you know someone willing to help you practice. However, online I was provided with flexibility and independence of how I learned and scheduled the course which is unavailable in face-to-face settings. Aspects that are found both virtual and in classroom settings would be reading and listening comprehension, these were similar with slight differences, online learning allowed the opportunity to watch a French TV show for listening comprehension whereas in classroom this would be more challenging due to time restraints.