View Content #18042

Jeff Magoto is the director of the Yamada Language Center at the University of Oregon and a member of CASLS' Advisory Board. He has been teaching and researching Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) for more than 25 years.

Over the past year I had the opportunity to work with a talented team of teachers and instructional designers to develop two MOOCs (massive open online courses): Shaping the Way We Teach English: The Landscape of ELT and Paths to Success in ELT (see course outline here).

Sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Office of English Language Programs and the University of Oregon, the courses ran back-to-back in Spring 2014 on the Coursera platform (and are slated to run again in Winter 2015).

From the outset we wanted to build a cMOOC, a connectivist MOOC (Downes, 2009), which we interpreted as an online course where participant interaction would be fundamental. Besides the cMOOC’s roots in collaborative learning and constructivism, we saw participant interaction as the key to overcoming the challenges of the “massive” part of the course: the many different backgrounds, ages, prior teaching experiences, and kinds of training our anticipated 6000 regular participants would be bringing to the MOOC.

So with interaction as a primary goal, here are some of the key elements of our course design for our second course, Paths to Success in ELT.  Each of these met with various successes and failures, but having learned a lot from our experience with The Landscape of ELT  they brought us closer to our cMOOC goal.

1. A predictable (but not necessarily sequential) path through materials and assignments. For most this meant a methodology of: experiencing, understanding, experimenting, and applying.
2. Required forum participation (for content areas); a system for acknowledging meaningful contributions.
3. Guest moderators in forums—they’d not only bring a fresh perspective to the weekly topic; they’d see and hear things about the state of the MOOC that we wouldn't.
4. Peer-to-peer evaluations of lesson plans (this stretched over 4 weeks and was the major assignment of the course). A sample lesson and rubric as InterCom's Activity of the Week: The Ideal Language Teacher.
5. Multiple opportunities for reflection and revision (and to catch up).
6. Opportunities for informal interaction: we offered an optional weekly contest based on a vocabulary learning technique, What is it?, first described by Nation (1978). Participants see thumbnail-size photographs of artifacts from around the world (mostly everyday objects, but very culturally specific), and had to guess what they were. They could either post to the “I know it” forum, or the far more popular (and interesting) “Let me guess” forum. Winning guesses were chosen at the end of the course based on creativity, cultural insight, and helpfulness in leading others down the right track. Accuracy mattered less than fluency.

Below, I’ll briefly discuss the most surprising for us, the last one, #6, the optional weekly contest.

For fans of radio quiz shows the fact that a contest generated as much forum traffic as it did may not be surprising (on average more than 300 per week participated, more than 1200 viewed the posts). One of the big challenges of MOOC teaching is constructing tasks where both risk-taking and risk averse students have an equal chance and interest in taking part. And where even those not participating are moved to listen in on what’s being talked about. That’s what What is it? seemed to accomplish: encouraging participants to take part in a simple guessing game seemed to encourage their participation in other, more high stakes areas of the course.  As one participant commented:

Thank you again for appreciating my answers in the contest forum—sometimes I was really at a loss about what the objects were—but I have learnt from my most creative students that it's worth giving it a crazy try, if that means reinterpreting the world around us in a positive and funny way! I will definitely use the "mysterious object" game in my classes.

References

Downes, S. (2009). Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge. In Collective Intelligence and E-Learning 2.0: Implications of Web-Based Communities and Networking, Harrison Hao Yang and Steve Chi-Yin Yuen, eds. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Nation, P. (1978). What Is it? A multipurpose language teaching technique. The English Teaching Forum, 16(3), 20-23, 32. Retrieved from https://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/paul-nation/1978-What-is-it.pdf

Wilson, G. and Stacey, E. (2004). Online interaction impacts on learning: Teaching the teachers to teach online. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology . Retrieved from http://ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/wilson.html