Shall we all unmute? A conversation analysis of participation in online reflection sessions for general practitioners in training

The COVID-19 pandemic has induced many changes to education in many contexts. In this study, we describe how general practitioners in training (residents) accomplish participation in collaborative reflection sessions conducted on Zoom. In this online setting, taking part in interactions is understood to be crucial to the creation of educational value. To study forms of participation used on Zoom, we recorded three group reflection sessions and examined them with Conversation Analysis. We focused on how participation is shaped by and is contingent upon the affordances of the online environment. Our analyses show that participants explicitly orient to the interactional accomplishment of participation in frameworks that change in the various phases of case discussion. Participants establish new procedures to deal with both familiar and sometimes new problems of participation introduced by the online environment. We describe these procedures in detail to contribute to the understanding of the accomplishment of participation through situated practices such as embodied talk-in-interaction. The findings can serve training purposes in online education across both medical and non-medical curricula.