LTMOOC: Week 1- First Hangout – Learn Experience Teach

Posted by karinawp on April 17, 2013February 16, 2015

First Google+ Hangout

For the first weekly discussion, a group of LTMOOC participants met in a warm and comfortable Google Hangout room (http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/).

The task at hand was to discuss the challenges of online learning.

Here are the main points of our 30 minute chat:

– constant interaction between teacher and student. The asynchronous communication of online learning allows the student to feel adequately supported, but it may also lead to teacher fatigue!

– a quick turn-around of assignments, and almost instantaneous feedback on questions or queries, again allows students to feel constantly supported. However, there are limitations on the teacher’s availability to respond to requests.

– the personalisation of materials. That is to say, online learning incorporates a certain flexibility to adapt the course to the specific needs of the student (if the bank of materials available is deep enough).

– establishing a relationship with students. How do you start a class without meeting face-to-face? Some suggestions included sending students individual welcome messages, or having the students make collages about themselves and their language learning experiences, and then posting them online.

Online Tools for Language Teaching and Learning

On this course we will be using the web platform Instreamia (http://www.instreamia.com/) to create our very own online lesson. (Instreamia uses online videos to teach world languages). I am quite looking forward to this part of the course, as I can ask my real students to try it out!

(Note to self: Instreamia can handle Japanese, so it stands to reason Chinese could be included too. Email Instreamia and ask them about plans to add Mandarin Chinese to the platform).

Glogster EDU (http://edu.glogster.com/), the visual communication network, was suggested as a good place for students to express themselves through a “glog”, or graphic blog. I look forward to trying that out myself first. And then I will use my own glog as an example for my own students to follow.