Week 2: Operational Issues

1. Constraints and benefits

I teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at Okayama University in Japan. It is called a ‘national university’ which means it is a publicly funded institution that gets its money from student fees and government support. The fees are lower than private universities. I say this because many people’s image of Japan is that it is a very high-tech place and that if you’re working in a university there it must be state-of-the-art with lots of great equipment. The reality is that, as a percentage of GDP, Japan’s spending on education is low and many higher education institutions are poorly resourced. For example, it is only in the last couple of years that Wi-Fi has been installed; there is no LMS and ‘Blackboard’ is literally a blackboard with chalk.

In such circumstances, I have used digital technology that is free for students and that they can use outside of the classroom. Examples of this include: Google Docs and Slides to make collaborative multimedia projects, Padlet for brainstorming and sharing ideas, Google Community as a kind of LMS for classes; creating Wikipedia pages for writing practice; and, Quizlet for vocabulary development. For colleagues, I created a WordPress site to share information about the curriculum, teaching approaches and so on.

Screenshot of an archived page from a teacher website

2. Technical Knowledge

I feel that my technical knowledge is limited to being a ‘visitor’ to the tools that I use and share with students but I haven’t left much trace behind me. One exception to that was my use of Google Plus as a makeshift LMS – students would post their projects (usually videos and slideshows) to the class community and give comments to each other. I would also give feedback to the students on their projects using the comment function. The screenshot below shows some of the class communities made using Google Plus.

3. Deployment of learning technology

As a result of the rather limited opportunities at university to use learning technology coupled with the desire to try and develop further skills I have developed (with my partner, Keiko Sakui) online courses using the Udemy platform. We use Keynote and iMovie to make videos that are mixture of slide shows, embedded talking heads, and animation. Since 2017, we have made three courses on English and communication (grammar, small talk and meetings). We have over 500 students that have signed up from 35 countries. Perhaps the main challenge, other than how to use the various software and understanding audio/video recording, has been how to structure the courses to maintain student motivation. We never meet the students face to face and the Udemy ecology provides limited communication opportunities for feedback. This means that we have tried a number of techniques so that motivation is maximised in the course itself. This was the topic of a presentation we made at SoTEL 2019 (which led to me taking this CMALT course).

2 thoughts on “Week 2: Operational Issues”

  1. A good start for this section Neil. A bit more reflection needed on the impact of these issues on your practice and the implications for student learning would be good. Links to examples or supporting literature/learning theory that supports your observations and critiques will lend weight and depth to your reflections.

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