Online teaching skills for language teachers

With the wide application of technology in teaching different subjects, online language teaching has gradually drawn people’s attention. Nowadays, some education agents in New Zealand are offering online courses for language learning. What they do is to recruit students located overseas and arrange online language learning courses for them with native teachers. This is attractive to the students because they can pay relatively less money and can learn from a native speaker online. However, there are a few issues that need to be considered in the planning of online language courses.

The first important consideration is the teacher’s skills and experience in offering online courses. According to Hampel and Stickler (n.d.), seven skills constitute the skills pyramid for online language teaching, which are basic ICT competence, specific technical competence for software, dealing with constraints and possibilities of the medium, online socialization, facilitating communicative competence, creativity and choice, and own style. Therefore, besides the basic skills for general online teaching, language teachers also need to emphasize online socialization, which is especially important for language learners. In addition, language teachers need to develop their own styles of teaching to facilitate the main features of language learning.

In addition to the consideration of teachers’ skills and experience, it needs to be aware that teaching language online is different from teaching any other subjects online. In language learning, to learn correct pronunciation and to practice listening skills, the students need to be able to actually hear the teacher talking and let themselves be heard by the teacher. To achieve this, it requires special software and also besides the online teaching materials the teacher needs to spend more time online to interact with the students.

All in all, language teachers need to devote themselves more to their teaching if they want to carry out their teaching online. Besides preparing all the online teaching materials, the teachers need to allocate more time to interact with the students online and provide prompt feedback to the students.

References:

Hampel, R. & Stickler, U. (n.d.). Online teaching skills for language tutors. Retrieved September 10, 2011 from http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/2530#ref9

Effective strategies for online teaching and learning

An enormous amount of information can be found about online teaching and learning strategies. Many things need to be considered in online teaching, such as various technology strategies, communication strategies and online learning material strategies. To narrow down the research, here I’d like to focus on the online teaching and learning strategies for adult literacy and numeracy education. For adult literacy and numeracy learners, there are a few features. For example, most of them are used to traditional learning and since they have literacy and numeracy needs, they might not be able to use the modern technology to learn. Therefore, the following strategies should be adopted specifically for the adult literacy and numeracy learners.

Firstly, an online adult literacy and numeracy program should have very clear goals and objectives, which should be made clear to the learners at the very beginning (Zhu, 2011). Thus, the adult learners will know clearly what they are learning and what they can achieve. This should be able to help them to motivate themselves.

Secondly, due to the students’ lack of knowledge about technology, complete and understandable instructions need to be given for different activities. Mature students are different from young learners and they do not dare to try new things. Also, students have different learning styles. If the instructions are difficult to follow, the students might end up with more confusion, which might create a kind of resentment to online learning. In addition, a Module Zero can be set up to let students get familiar with the course and the technology software to be used. In this Module Zero, clear instructions need to be given to tell the students what softwares are to be used and how to use them.

Thirdly, teachers need to provide timely and specific feedback to let the students know their problems (Everson, 2009). The feedback can be given in various ways, such as in written forms or even through video conferencing. It can give the students a sense of human factors in the learning process, which they are familiar with in traditional learning.

Finally, the collaborative group work project is an effective way for learners to cooperate with each other (Bonk, 2010; Everson, 2009). At the same time, communication between learners should be encouraged so that they will not miss the familiar learning environment that they have experienced in traditional face-to-face teaching and learning (Roper, 2007).

In conclusion, in spite of the numerous teaching strategies available online, specific strategies need to be adopted for adult literacy and numeracy online teaching and learning. The features of adult learners and their literacy and numeracy needs must be considered when the adult literacy and numeracy teachers are designing their online courses. Thus, the value of learning can be enhanced.

References:

Bonk, C. (2010). Video primers in an online respository for e-teaching & learning. Retrieved August 27, 2011, from http://www.indiana.edu/~icy/media/de_series.html

Everson, M. (2009). 10 Things I’ve learned about teaching online. Retrieved August 28, 2011, from http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=1609990

Roper, A. R. (2007). How students develop online learning skills. Educause Quarterly, 30 (1). Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/HowStudentsDevelopOnlineLearni/157435

Zhu, E. (2011). Practical guidelines for using technology tools in classroom teaching. Retrieved August 27, 2011, from http://www.crlt.umich.edu/gsis/P4_3.php

Motivation in online learning

Motivation can be defined as a driving force for people to achieve a goal, which includes both intrinsic and extrinsic factors (Wikipedia, 2011). Motivation in learning has been a research topic in the academic field for a long time. However, there is still not much documentation on motivations in online learning. Motivation is very difficult evaluate because it is hard to tell why people have some behaviors.

Many theories and models can be found about motivation. To give two examples, the ARCS theory looks at four factors: attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction (Smith, 2008). On the other hand, the social cognitive learning theory emphasizes the importance of self-efficacy, a person’s belief about his ability to perform a certain task, and self-regulation, the control of the learning activity (Wikipedia, 2011).

As for the motivation in e-learning, four trends have been identified: personalization, adaptivity, affective tutoring and collaborative learning (Cocea & Weibelzahl, 2006). In some other research, it is found that the relevance of materials, timely feedback, goal-driven and product-based activities, personal growth, flexibility, interaction, collaboration and variety of activities all influence the learner’s motivation in online learning (Bonk cited in Smith, 2008; Knowles & Kerkman, 2007). Therefore, to motivate the learners online, the teacher needs to take a few measures. Firstly, the learning content should be related with the learners’ personal life or jobs. Secondly, the students need to be encouraged to brainstorm and share ideas so that they have an initiative to participate in the online learning and interact with each other. Thirdly, the teacher should organize some team projects for the learners to collaborate with and help each other. Fourthly, timely feedback needs to be provided so that students can feel the teacher is always there to help them and support them. Finally, different methods should be tried to attract the learners’ attention, such as using music, offering flexible learning content and a variety of activities, or inviting electronic guests.

In terms of literacy and numeracy education, in addition to the above mentioned motivation techniques, the most important consideration for an online course is its easy design and operation. This can help to promote self-efficacy, to make the students believe they have the ability to learn well online. Since most learners in this course have some sort of literacy or numeracy needs, they may not be familiar with computer technology and complicated softwares or programs may create a kind of psychological barrier among them and stop them from trying the new way of learning. What’s more, personalization is an important motivation factor in online learning among the literacy and numeracy students. The students should be able to choose what they want to learn and the learning process should be related with the students’ personal life or jobs. This may help students feel they have more control of their learning activity. If the learning content and the learning process can be combined freely at the students’ choice, the students will have more interest in learning it.

In conclusion, there are many factors influencing motivation in online learning. What a literacy and numeracy teacher needs to do is to stimulate both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation factors among the students so that they may find interest in their learning activities.

References:

Cocea, M., & Weibelzahl, S. (2006). Motivation – included or excluded from e-learning. doi: 10.1.1.75.520

Knowles, E., & Kerkman, D. (2007). An investigation of students attitude and motivation toward online learning. Student Motivation, 2, 70-80. Retrieved online from http://www.insightjournal.net/

Smith, R. (2008). Motivational factors in e-learning. Retrieved online from http://www.ruthcsmith.com/GWU%20Papers/Motivation.pdf

Wikipedia (2011). Motivation. Retrieved online from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation

Philosophies of teaching and technology

Kanuka (2008) presents three positions in the philosophies of technology, which are uses determinism, technological determinism and social determinism, and several teaching philosophies, such as liberal, progressive, behaviorist, humanist, radical and analytical orientations. At the moment, I am in the position of uses determinism. I agree that computers should be perceived as neutral tools for helping learners build their knowledge and learners should not be controlled by technology. Accordingly, my present teaching is of progressive orientation, in which the teacher and students have a partnership relationship and the teacher’s role is to organize and evaluate. The aim of students’ learning is for personal growth, and the instruction methods are basically experimental and problem-solving. In online teaching and learning, the interaction between the teacher and students is crucial in all kinds of activities. The teacher needs to find an effective way to involve the students in online activities. And if the students find it difficult to use the technology, the teacher needs to help solve the problem rather than letting the technology restrict the students from learning freely.

However, with the prevalence of the Internet, people can now do almost anything online. As a result, technology is being integrated into social and cultural changes. I believe, in the education system, technology will play a positive role to improve the quality of learning. Of course, I’m not saying that technology will be everything. The main purpose of learning is still to make the society better. In my opinion, both technology and society will have profound influence on each other in the future. Therefore, I would like to end up in a position between technological determinism and social determinism so that in teaching, I will focus not only on the content but also on students’ collaboration and communication.

Kanuka, H. (2008). Understanding e-learning technologies-in-practice through philosophies-in-practice. In The theory and practice of online learning (pp.91-118). Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/99Z_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Learning theories in online teaching

Ally (2008) summarizes four schools of learning, i.e. behaviorist, cognitivist, constructivist, and connectivist learning theories and their implications on online learning. The first three learning theories are used frequently in traditional learning, while the connectivist theory is a relatively new one. According to the connectivist theory, learners cannot transfer their knowledge and build new knowledge (Kop & Hill, 2008). What has surprised me most is that “the learners have to unlearn what they have learned in the past and learn how to learn and evaluate new information.” (Siemens as cited in Ally, 2008, p. 19).

In my opinion, people learn new things every day, relate them with their previous knowledge and accumulate them together for future use. However, in online learning, due to the rapid change of technology, there are new softwares and information coming up very often, so people do need to unlearn some obsolete knowledge so that they can adopt the up-to-date information. For LLN teaching and learning, the challenge for the teachers is how to make the learners give up their old knowledge and their old ways of learning, and to encourage them to use the up-to-date technology to learn.

Ally, M. (2008). Foundations of educational theory for online learning. In The theory and practice of online learning (pp.15-44). Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/99Z_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Kop, R. & Hill, A. (2008). Connectivism: learning theory of the future or vestige of the past? International review of research in open and distance learning. 9 (3). Retrieved August 5, 2011 from http://www.irrodl.org

Welcome to my blog!

This blog is set up for  my Master's course at AUT - Online Teaching and Learning. The focus of the blog will be on discussions about how to use technology in teaching adult literacy and numeracy. This is the first week of the course. I am very excited when thinking about what I will do in this course because I am keen on learning about technology. I hope I can use this blog to share my ideas with others and to learn from others as well. So, everybody is welcome to leave your comments about my blogs.