Protecting and respecting the participants of the study is of utmost importance. As the large-scale questionnaire studies were carried out online, the identity of the participants was not revealed even to the researcher. In the interview studies, participants are referred to using pseudonyms, and data collection (voice recording) only began when participants agreed to being recorded after they had been told about the nature and scope of the research so that they could give their informed consent to participate and to be recorded. There were no minors involved in the interview studies, therefore, only the individuals’ consent was sought. The voice recordings were not shared with anyone else, and once the transcripts were created, the recordings were deleted. Recruitment documents, interview guides and consent forms underwent expert reviews and were in the end approved by the ethics committee of the researcher’s Doctoral School prior to administration.

Participants of the interview studies had the chance to opt out from the research process whenever they preferred to. After much thought given to this issue, in the end, the researcher decided not to disclose the name of the institutions the instructor interviewees worked for as well as any other personal details that would have been revealing and would have easily contributed to identifying the participants. Interview participants also had the chance to ask about the research process before, during or after the interviews were recorded; however, for the sake of the interviews, technical details and the purpose of the interviews were not directly revealed to the participants. As for the questionnaire studies, the name and email address of the researcher were included both in the welcome and in the final messages of the online data collection tool, but apart from some friendly collegial messages, no inquiries were addressed towards the researcher.

Ethical considerations also applied for handling data and reporting the findings. The researcher did not tamper with any of the data; however, some data purification procedures were used, such as systematically disregarding certain amounts of data from the quantitative analysis procedures if they are proven to be unreliable (e.g., when the discriminant validity of the scales were not fulfilled or when Cronbach’s alpha values did not reach the 0.6 cut-off value). Apart from the learner pilot questionnaire, all other quantitative data was collected online, the datasets were loaded into SPSS directly, ruling out the possibility of human error when exporting and importing the dataset. The researcher also did everything to report qualitative data truthfully, without misinterpreting and misrepresenting what the participants said by applying co-coding, prolonged engagement, and cyclical coding with the interview transcripts. Before making final decisions concerning ethical dilemmas (such as how much to disclose about the participants of the sub-studies), the researcher consulted Dörnyei and Csizér’s (2012) and Larson-Hall’s (2012) chapters on conducting quantitative research, Friedman’s (2012) chapter on how to carry out and report on qualitative studies and Creswell’s (2009) already mentioned chapter on research ethics.