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In this paper, the focus is on the analysis of student-teacher interaction occurring in online synchronous virtual settings in higher education. The preliminary findings of the study draw upon empirical material that consists of 20 online sessions (both students-only and teacher-led, with approximately 40 hours of interaction material), that are parts of the “Italian for beginners” and “Russian for beginners” online language courses at university level and informal interviews with the participants.Our interests here relate to accounting for how students and teachers of the two online language courses interact inside a multimodal and multilingual online synchronous environment. The study deals with issues of how technology mediated multimodal communication affects power shift between teacher – student and student – student interaction. In particular the paper illustrates how videoconferencing reflects on power shifts between the participants and in what ways these shifts become significant for the learning process in these settings. Being inside the virtual classroom and only engaging in technology mediated communication to interact in a learning community means that the students and teachers need to adjust to the new media and artifacts available. The study takes a sociocultural theoretical approach to tracing the ways technology enhances or hinders communication in a community of practice where different literacy practices occur at the same time (Gee & Hayes, 2011).Preliminary findings show that the teachers as well as the students position themselves both as facilitators for other participants of the use of different modes as text chat, whiteboard, audio and video, and also as more peripheral participants who need to be guided in the communication afforded in the online environment. The active users of these different modes seem to obtain the keys to get access to the environment and the participation inside the group in contrast to the students who do not use all the available modes in the virtual settings, thus influencing the power shifts in the group during the same session.