Online and hybrid courses offer many benefits for ESL teacher education, but can be hampered by ‘transactional distance’, a lack of interpersonal closeness which can cause misunderstanding and disengagement. This article describes a pedagogical project in which in-service teachers studying in a distance-learning MA TESL programme in Sri Lanka participated in an asynchronous discussion forum with peers from a university in New York City to discuss varieties of World Englishes. The project increased dialogue between learners, and between learners and the instructor, providing space for informal interactions through text, images, and video, as well as multiple methods for responding to feedback, ultimately reducing transactional distance. This article discusses the benefits of the project as well as the pedagogical and technological challenges, offering suggestions for other MA TESL educators about implementing such collaborations

中文翻译：

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通过在线国际合作减少距离

在线课程和混合课程为ESL教师教育提供了许多好处，但是可能受到“交易距离”的阻碍，交易距离的缺乏人际亲密性会导致误解和脱离。本文介绍了一个教学项目，在该项目中，在斯里兰卡的远程学习MA TESL计划中学习的在职教师与来自纽约市一所大学的同龄人参加了异步讨论论坛，以讨论各种世界英语。该项目增加了学习者之间以及学习者与指导者之间的对话，为通过文本，图像和视频以及多种响应反馈的方法进行非正式交互提供了空间，最终缩短了交易距离。本文讨论了该项目的收益以及教学和技术方面的挑战，