ESL Outreach Workshop

Welcome to my English Studies blog.

Cheryl asked me to think about ways to develop an online component to your classes. From what she has told me, the community centres usually have computers available for the students, and most of you are already using them quite a lot. What you're interested in is developing activities that Outreach students can do from home, or wherever they can find a computer, as a non-face 2 face part of the course.

You know I'm no expert - working with online tools is really new for me (some of you've probably been using the Internet with your students longer than I have), but since I've been asked to say something, maybe I can throw out a few ideas.

First, what kinds of activities can students do online?

You're already using "interactive exercises". By that I mean the kind of exercises where the student practices on their own with the computer. Things like Randall's ESL Listening Lab and Movie Trailers are examples. I might know a few sites that you haven't found yet, but I understand you've got a pretty comprehensive list. If you'd like to see my list, go to the Computer Assisted ESL Activities blog: http://eslexercises.blogspot.com/
If you find anything useful, please help yourself.

You can certainly use WebQuests. There are some good ready to use WebQuests, and Trackstar is a great tool to help you create your own. Some WebQuest projects can take days of class time to complete, but there's no reason why students couldn't do that work on their own, during their independent online time, once the teams were set up and "launched." What I have on WebQuests is also on the ESL Activities blog, and there's a section about Trackstar in the "Create your own WebQuests" section.

And then there's writing. I only know a couple of interactive websites for writing practice. Paragraph Punch looks interesting, but for academic writing, you might want to join the Yahoo! Group for Academic Writing. Of course, it's also possible to set up student weblogs. That's one of my favourite topics. There's more information about blogs in the posting below this one, "IE Workshop on Using Weblogs with ESL Students."

In summary, without needing anything more than access to computers, Outreach instructors could use a combination of interactive exercises to reinforce content and skills learned in class, WebQuests for project work (involving all skills) and student blogs to journal progress and publish results. For the most part, you could work on skills development in the face to face class and use online activities to reinforce and further develop these skills.

Active Learning Online

Some people think that learning online involves simply transferring course materials to the computer. That's the main reason why some students have a negative experience when they take an online course. The materials and activities have to fit the medium. Just as we strive to make our face-2-face courses as interactive as possible, so do we find ways to make online components to our courses as interactive and communicative as possible. It's not hard to do. There are lots of opportunities for project work and collaboration among students through shared assignments like WebQuests, which can conclude with oral (f2f) presentations, and students can prepare powerpoint slides, blogs or webpages as visual support. Or, they can do a paper poster, if that's more comfortable, to go with their oral presentation.

How will students communicate?

One of the first things we need to establish for online learners is lines of communication among the students and with the instructor. E-mail is probably the first thing that comes to mind. For sure, that's one way, and it's possible to suggest that students flag a message that they want a quick reply to as "urgent" so it'll stand out if there are a lot of messages. But there are other, more efficient ways.

Instant messaging is made to order. You may need to get firewalls lowered (we did this in IE) and special permission, but it's worth the bother if you want students to be able to work on projects together (eg: they can all look at the same website while they discuss) and there's the option to use voice chat ($20 will buy a decent headset) and conferencing. Text chat can be saved, and some places like Alado or Elluminate - if you get access - will allow voice recording. (Lots of possibilities there!). Some students may even have web cams, which are fun to use in messaging. In the Computer Assisted ESL Activities blog, http://eslexercises.blogspot.com/, there's more information about instant messaging, and a tutorial to help students set up Yahoo! IM.

Another free tool that could be useful is "Skype". It's like making a phone call through the computer, and the sound quality is supposed to be excellent. Of course, there's always the regular phone too!

Is that it? Well, not quite. Have you thought about what sort of platform you want to use?

Up to now, VCC has used WebCT for its online courses. I believe there's a consensus that WebCT will be replaced by a different Learning Management System, but so far no official decision about what that will be has been made. The LMS that I'm most familiar with is Moodle. I did most of my online courses on it during my Ed leave.

Moodle is "open source" - which means it's free. You can set up your own site and change it to suit your needs. Of course, you'd have to know a lot about the technical side to be able to do that. VCC has a Moodle site, but D.D. is reluctant to put anymore courses on it until there's a decision about which LMS the college will choose. (Even though it's free, the technicians that support it aren't).

What's the advantage of using a Learning Management System? It's a central place to meet all your students, put your assignments, set up weekly schedules, etc. Moodle also offers threaded discussion forums, chat, journals, a quiz feature, student profile section, and more. It's very easy to use and you can add whatever features you want, or leave them out. It helps to keep you organized and see where you're going, whether you are a student or the teacher. (Guess you can tell that I'd like to have it at VCC). If you want to take a look at a couple of Moodle sites, click on the link to Knowplace http://www.knowplace.ca , which is where most of my courses were, or Knowtips, http://www.knowtips.ca , which is a special site set up for a Knowplace organized conference, which will be held this month, from February 23 to 27th. You might want to attend!

Do you need a Learning Management System? No. But I think it would make life easier. My next choice would be a blog. It's free, simple to use, and flexible. (Again, see below for more information). Another option would be a webpage, especially if you have experience creating webpages.

I'm going to stop here, because I think that's all we have time for, but before I do, let me just mention a few other considerations:

You might want to use one of the self-assessment tools that are available for prospective students in online classes to see if online learning would suit them (BCCampus has a nice one).

You might want to consider whether the students have good enough (English) keyboard skills for online study. This hasn't been a problem for the International students I'm working with, but it's something to make sure students are aware of when they register.

I feel strongly that we need to teach them about Internet security and help develop information literacy. Internet security is something we all need to remind ourselves about, and how to avoid exposing ourselves to viruses. Information literacy is something that would probably be ongoing. I mean how to narrow down an Internet search and evaluate sources of information - that sort of thing. It's a very important skill and there are some good sites on the Internet.

So, that's it. I hope you'll take a few minutes to explore some of the links on this blog, and that what I've mentioned is useful.