"The recording has started": Notes on the sudden move to online teaching

Since Garfinkel's early work (2002) in the 1970s, few researchers have studied university classroom activities to understand what is seen as the performance features of university learning. The purpose of these studies was to explicate what it is that is unique to universities about these activities. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, HEIs have moved a lot of their teaching online, thus changing the nature of the classroom. The workplace specific nature of the classroom has therefore changed to a virtual one, but the discipline specific nature of activities remains the same. For participants of these virtual classrooms to be acknowledged as vulgarly competent (Garfinkel 2002), there is a need for the activities to remain accountably recognisable to all parties. For the social order to be sustained and recognised, there is a need for this competence, but for many participants, students and lecturers alike, this was the first time of participating in their daily university activity in this virtual way. The participants may be entering the domain with a weak competence (Ikeya 2020) of the context, but with enough unique adequacy to sustain ongoing social order. This hybrid study draws on online lectures carried out in a business school, using ethnomethodological tools to understand the development of vulgar competence.