MOOCs and COMAs (read to the end)!

This post stems from a recent discussion being held over at ELT Jam on whether MOOCs are suitable for ELT.

I recommend you read the original post written by Nick Robinson, as it makes for very interesting reading, but as with many blog posts, where the topic really comes alive is in the discussion that follows in the Comments section. Both viewpoints (for and against) are expressed in these comments, and really get you thinking about if and how Massive Open Online Courses could be an alternative to face-to-face or blended courses in the realm of English Language Teaching.

In this post I will go into more detail on thoughts I have had since reading the post and comments on ELT Jam.

Thanks to G Forsythe

For the past two years I have co-moderated along with some fantastic people, a Digital Storytelling course with EVO (Electronic Village Online). EVO is free online teacher training provided by volunteer moderators and runs for 5 weeks each year. It is not really a full MOOC as there tends to be 200-300 participants on our course, which is why we decided to call it a SMOOC (Small Massive Open Online Course), even if that sounds like an oxymoron! EVO itself has been successfully running for many more years.

When we started, Shelly Terrell, as the creator of the course proposal, had already planned the outline of the course and each of the moderators took responsibility for developing the content of one of the five weeks. We have a wiki with all the syllabus information, a place for discussion and another to post tasks. Ideally, a MOOC would have all these spaces integrated so that it is clear for students where to post comments, projects etc. We added tasks that participants had to complete during the week, including reading articles and blogs and then commenting in the discussion forum, trying out tools and posting the results, and as always, commenting on each other's work.

As I mentioned in my comment on ELT Jam, I think a similar course could be run for English Language Learners. I joined a French MOOC last year, which was based on video. You would watch the video and answer comprehension and language questions. There were no tutors on the course, but you could check your answers as you completed exercises. I personally used another tool called Memrise to help me learn the new vocabulary.

Personally, I think a healthy mix of different types of media would enhance the course, including texts (these could be authentic - articles from online newspapers, blogs etc), games to practice language and some kind of space where learners could connect to each other to practice their productive skills. 

As for the syllabus of the course, I suggest dividing it into several modules or units (as in traditional language education) that are progressive in terms of the language and skills required. However, instead of following a traditional syllabus, organised by grammar or vocabulary, I think a task-based approach would be more suited to a MOOC, or any other online course. Why? Firstly, a task-based approach easily allows learners to progress at their own pace. It also allows for more interaction than simple question and answer type exercises which tend to abound on the internet, as learners would be able to discuss the tasks in a forum, or even work together to complete a task. There could be some language work for learners to do either before, during or after the task is completed. This language could also be discussed in the forum among the students, and the moderator could help direct this discussion. This way, emergent language could be focused on, or at the very least, several language areas that would typically stem from each task could be suggested. Students would have more control over the language they are using and learning.

I think a task-based course needs to be carefully structured so that it gradually increases in level. One of the most important things is, in my opinion, to make the first few tasks fairly simple, in order to introduce learners to the format of the tasks. Another important aspect is having learners get to know each other before the course starts. At EVO, we always begin with participants trying out one of the tools we present in the first week to introduce themselves. We encourage them to welcome each other and comment on each other's intros. This creates a nice group atmosphere and allows participants to feel confident enough to comment and discuss their ideas with each other.

One of the main problems I see is the fact that many MOOCs are free. Of course, this is great for the students, but I'm not sure where the money would come from to actually set up and run the course. With EVO, it is just 5 weeks and can survive on volunteers, but this would not be sustainable for a long-term course. As I said before, a quality course would need a lot of planning, requiring many hours from the content creators, tutors and moderators. These people would need paying! People looking for online courses tend to go for the free ones... and I can understand why. There is no guarantee that the course would live up to your expectations. It is common for learners to lose motivation and drop out, unless they are working towards some kind of certification. Perhaps such a course could be done on a modular basis, where students buy modules in turn, like ELT Teacher 2 Writer is doing?

Another issue is the O for Open. If a course is freely open to everyone, there will not be any control over who enrols. I suffered this personally after enrolling on a course in Android App development. Having no programming knowledge whatsoever, I joined a course advertised as one in which "no programming knowledge is required". Of course, after trying really hard to get to grips with Java, reading "Beginner's Java for Dummies" and asking for help from the tutor, I ended up dropping out. In ELT this would mean people joining the wrong level, as they join a B1 or B2 level course in the quest for certification. A new part of my job this year is convincing people of their real level and that they need more than just a few months of lessons in order to pass the exam they need. In a MOOC, there would be nobody to do this, unless some kind of entrance level test were required.

Do you think a MOOC is suitable for language learning? How would you address the problems outlined above?

Is a task-based approach appropriate? I'd love to hear more ideas about this, either here or on the ELT Jam blog.

Ending on a more humourous note, in Spain MOOCs have been unfortunately translated as COMA (Curso Online Masivo Abierto)! Just imagine saying that you are "on a MOOC" bearing in mind that the preposition "on" and "in" are often both "en" in Spanish! 

Wiki Waste of Time?

This year I set up a wiki for one of my classes. The class in question is a group of six year old children, mostly in their second year of English, and with whom I have been imparting my own content-based syllabus instead of using a course book.

The purpose of wikis, generally, is to encourage the sharing of information, allowing members to edit and add to the entries. This was not my objective in this case, but I preferred the look and navegability of the wiki to a traditional blog, like this one. In a blog, entries are in chronological order, making it difficult to find older posts if those posts are not tagged adequately, or if the user is not aware of how blogs work. In the wiki, there would be a menu of all the pages I created, in the order that I wished to publish them, and a home page with links to every single page.

Home page of our class wiki

The other main reason why I chose an Edu Wikispace, free at the time, was that I could make it private. Personally, I would love to share with the world everything that we have been doing, but I wanted to have the possibility of posting photos and videos of the children for their parents to see, and therefore privacy was a big issue.

Wikispaces makes it really simple to embed almost any kind of multimedia content including Youtube videos, Glogs, documents which can be downloaded, RSS feeds, slideshows etc.

At the beginning of the year, I sent a letter out to all the parents explaining that we wouldn't be using a course book and for this reason, I had set up a website where they would be able to see all the topics we were covering in class. They would be able to look at the page with their child to practice the language we had been learning. On the wiki I include all the songs and videos we have seen in class, so that the children can see them again if they want to. I explained that the webpage would be completely private and that each child would receive a username and password that would be necessary to access the site. The parents seemed to think it was a good idea, and they all filled in the consent slip I added to the bottom of the letter. I proceeded to create bulk user accounts and gave each child a copy of their username and password.

I regularly update the wiki with new content, as you will see from the screenshot above. I assumed that most of the parents were visiting from time to time. On a couple of occasions, parents had asked me for another copy of their access details, which they had misplaced.

So it was to my surprise, this morning, when I looked at the wikis stas and saw that it had hardly been visited at all. Five different users (although this could include anonymous users from search engines that had tried to access the site) entered the wiki in the first month, but after that only an average of two or three users had visited per month. There are ten children in the class, so my impression is that only a small number of them have seen the wiki more than once or twice.

My priority now is to find out why there has been such little interest in the wiki. I actually thought parents would be interested in what their young children were doing in their lessons, and would take this opportunity to find out. I hoped that they would sit down with their children and go over what they had been learning in their two weekly lessons. How wrong I seem to have been!

I am thinking of sending out a questionnaire towards the end of the year, on how useful they found the wiki and what problems they had. They all seemed to find the idea attractive, but few of them seem to have done much more. I imagine that time is a huge issue here, but it would only take a few minutes every week to see what's new. I'd like to know if you have any experiences of using wikis/blogs with very young learners as a wasy of encouraging them to interact with English outside of the classroom. Has anybody come up against any lack of interest, as I seem to have? Any ideas for questions to include in my questionnaire to parents.

This just goes to show that, although everybody uses technology in their day to day life, this does not automatically mean that they want to use it related to their own or their children's learning, especially if this requires more effort on their part.

And, thinking of the time and effort I have spent on this project - is it really worth it?

Your Virtual English Friend

Having just watched a short video of the Microsoft's presentation of their "virtual human", I started thinking how this technology could change language learning.

Milo is a virtual boy. You see him on your TV screen. He will do as you command, but he's not just a character in a computer game. Milo actually responds to your oral commands, answers your questions and interacts with objects that you give him. In the video the girl passes Milo a drawing she has just done on a piece of paper and he take sthe paper from her and responds. Now, doesn't that seem incredible? We can't pass objects through the TV screen! Of course, the paper itself doesn't leave the girl's hand, but an exact replica of the piece of paper is scanned and it's data sent to Milo. The player and Milo interact and this interaction is so much more realistic than in previous video games because facial expressions and body langauge are so successfully portrayed. When the girl asks Milo about his homework, he acquires a sheepish expression. I have no idea how this technology works, and I'm sure that when it is released as a game it will not be anywhere near as effective or realistic as in this demonstration (just like most video game adverts and demos) but even if it does half of what we expect, it can be exploited in many different areas, not just entertainment.

Imagine you have your own English friend with whom you can converse, play games and explore. For a learner of English this is a brilliant opportunity to practise the language. Learners who live in a country where English is not spoken by most people can have great difficulties in practising the language outside of class. With somebody like Milo in their XBox, they can have a fairly realistic experience of interacting with a real English boy. This will surely interest children and teenagers, but I think a similar product could be developed for adults too. Imagine a "game" where you have to negotiate with a board of businessmen who react and respond to everything you say. To be honest, the possiblities are endless.

Let's just hope that one day soon this technology is released into the market, and at a reasonable price. Then we will all be able to have our own mini English friend!

The article from BBC News here 

Email in English Scheme

I have decided to set up a scheme for my teenage (FCE and CAE) students that I have called "Email in English". Basically, I want to have the students open a new email account, separate from their normal email, in which they will use only English. The idea is for me to send them homework assignments by email and for them to be able to share things they like with each other.

Homework is something that all teenagers hate, they get far too much of it from school, and they don't really have much time to spend on doing English homework from their language academy. Also, most of the homework I tend to set for these exam prep groups are writing pieces to practice for the writing part of the exam, and grammar or vocabulary exercises that we haven't had time to finish in class. Most of the time it impossible to get every piece of homework from every student, or even if they do it, they may have spent 5 minutes before the class scribbling it on a piece of paper.

My idea, then, is to make homework more fun and relevant to their interests. I will be able to send them things that I have received - jokes, powerpoint presentations, videos on Youtube, interesting articles etc. With the use of Youtube, this means that I can set listening tasks as well as just reading or writing.

Another plus is that email accounts such as Gmail include a live chat. No program is needed to be installed, you can just chat directly from your email. I hope that my students will try to chat to each other, and possibly me, in English. This should improve their ability to think in English, and make it easier when speaking, as well as being a fun way to use English in their free time.