Lynsey Lee, an adjunct Korean language instructor, has worked through this question while teaching the University of Guam's fully asynchronous Elementary Korean courses, KO101 and KO102.

Lee recently shared some of the approaches she uses at UOG during the 2026 Korean Online Language Pedagogy Series, a three-part professional development series hosted by the National Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

As a panelist for a session focused on learner interaction, Lee discussed ways to help beginning Korean students communicate, collaborate, and build confidence in an online environment.

“I shared approaches developed through my teaching at UOG to help beginning Korean learners communicate, collaborate, and build confidence online,” Lee said.

Her approach follows a principle she describes as “function first, platform second.” Rather than starting with a particular technology, Lee considers what kind of interaction will help students learn and then selects the appropriate tool.

In her UOG courses, that can include collaborative assignments, voice and video discussions, and other activities that allow students to interact without requiring them to be online at the same time. One example Lee shared was the K-Tourism project, which asks students to apply their developing Korean language skills to a setting close to home. Students create bilingual resources for Korean tourists visiting Guam, incorporating feedback from community partners, classmates, and their instructor.

The project gives beginning language students an opportunity to use Korean for a practical purpose while connecting their coursework to Guam's community.

For Lee, sharing these experiences with other Korean language educators also brought a Guam perspective to the broader discussion about online language instruction.

“My participation in the panel provided an opportunity to contribute teaching practices grounded in UOG's online classroom and Guam's community to a national conversation about Korean online language pedagogy,” Lee said.

Lee has taught Korean in higher education and community settings on Guam since 2011 and initiated UOG's Korean course offerings in 2017.