The course for a rainy day

 

Since the pandemic started almost all the teachers have experienced what emergency remote teaching is and not all of these experiences were smooth. Due to it suddenness not everybody was able quickly to adapt and design online courses that would answer to requirements of all students, teachers and curriculum needs. Therefore, having some online course in your pocket for a pinch situation or so called “a rainy day” would be a nice step as a precaution. This is a fragment of the course for the task of Innovative LTEP module, which could be used as an independent online distant course if extended and customized a little.

The given online course is aimed for the students of the second course of a Non-language University for the subject of English proficiency of language, where students will practice and develop their core skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking. If to speak about students’ background and experience in technology and join to what Doug Holton and his colleagues’ assertions say that the typology of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” by Prensky (2009) ‘is dead or at least dying’, I would rather tell that the target students are mostly “visitors” and some part of them even “residents” of Digital World (White and Le Cornu, 2011). Even if there were some “Digital Aliens” among students offline before, the last year pandemic and moving online in education, definitely changed the ‘citizenship statuses' of all students, who wanted to continue their education despite all odds, leveling them up in digital literacy.  

I decided to locate my course in Google Classroom as a Learning Management System (LMS). Google Suite has a lot of advantages for users such as maximum of availability and simplicity. It has no ‘expiration date’ in free version as Moodle does and there are a lot of plug-in tools, which G Suite provides. They are very helpful if I want to integrate the learning theories in my teaching extensively, for example, Google Docs could be used for online collaborative work in written format as there is a function of public commenting on others’ writing and opportunity for a teacher to see, who exactly contributed to what part of the document. Similar to many modern LMS platforms Google Classroom has the same Mobile App, which is very convenient in terms of completing the tasks anytime, anywhere, it has assignments deadline settings, ability of inviting students to the course by different means (by e-mail, link or class code), calendar, freedom to organize your course the way you like and general stream, where students and teacher can share some thoughts or materials, communicate in discussions, commenting, reactions and so on, but what is real benefit that not all LMS have in itself is unlimited users and storage capacity. However, there are some drawbacks can be found as well: all users should have Google account to have access to this LMS and its apps, which is not always appropriate, because not all students had it in advance, so they have to create an additional account or design does not look as sophisticated as in Moodle, for example.

 My course consists of three first study weeks of the course, with workload for approximately nine hours.

I considered it would be rational to provide students with the information about the course, its assessment policy and requirements and rules of the university in the Introduction Week. I also included Netiquette to prevent any misunderstandings and give the basics of proper behavior online, which is essential for any ‘netizen’, because as Jenny Preece said “One person’s clever joke is another person’s offensive insult” (2004). In order to integrate connectivism theory we need a special atmosphere and Netiquette is a base as “class interactions using netiquette encourage social interactions, community building, and trust between participants. It promotes a safe, engaging, respectful, and collaborative group where diversity of opinion is valued” (Netiquette, no date). To increase students’ digital literacy and also that it did not smite students on the head like a hammer; I included some resource materials where they can find tutorials on the apps and tools we are going to use during the course. And at last I gave the task in Flipgrid to record a short video with introducing yourself.

Week two and three include now more collaborative work and communication among students, where behaviourism in Quizzlet, Cognitivism in reading an article, watching a video and answering Google Forms, constructivism and connectivism in group discussions and video recordings work for its full power.

I tried to use different concept of a HyperDoc in the third week. Hyperdoc is a type of “hub”, where in one document be it Google Doc or Google Slides or other alternatives all the links and instructions for students are provided in order assigned by a teacher and student don’t need to hop from one place to another to follow the instructions.

Perhaps, for the better establishing of the ‘social presence’ I would record a video of me welcoming the students in introduction week in the future and hope it will create the right educational climate as will be associated with the traditional offline first lesson, students have each study year.

 (Word Count 864)

Netiquette (no date). Instruct­ional Resources. Available from https://blog.citl.mun.ca/instructionalresources/netiquette/ [Accessed 26 March 2022].

Preece, J. (2004). Etiquette online. Communications of the ACM, 47 (4), 56-61. Available from 10.1145/975817.975845.

White, D. and Le Cornu, A. (2011). View of Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement | First Monday. Firstmonday.org. Available from https://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049 [Accessed 26 March 2022].