1. An understanding of teaching, learning and/or assessment processes
I will focus on one course to exemplify teaching, learning, and assessment processes. This is a compulsory English course for second-year students who meet twice a week for eight weeks. They are from various faculties such as science, engineering, and environmental science. There are seven goals for the course. For the sake of brevity, I will illustrate two of them (with suggestions for assessment in parenthesis).
| By taking this course students will further develop their 1) fluency and 2) accuracy in oral communication (speaking assessment using rubrics to evaluate conversations, short presentations and speeches, poster presentations, interviews, teacher observations) |
Students have a high level of specialist knowledge and my role is to enable them to articulate that knowledge in English in an academic way. Using technology is a great way to do this so I have a dual role in teaching them about technology and about English. For a speaking assessment, the students produce PowerPoint slide presentations with embedded audio that they upload to YouTube and share on Moodle (I previously used Google Community and Brainshark but these tools have been phased out).
Students create four presentations during the course. I set the overall theme (1) self-introduction, 2) international student guide, 3) a social issue, and 4) research project) but the students choose their own topics. Lessons are a mixture of input from myself about the topic: introducing a context and generating a schema (Anderson, 2000); reviewing useful vocabulary; and, providing models of presentations (videos that I make and upload to YouTube). Subsequently, students work together to brainstorm ideas for their slideshow presentations and once they have started creating them they help each other to improve them.
Once completed, students view each other’s slideshows and complete a rubric as a form of reflection. I grade the students using the same rubric. There are four components to the grading scale (very good, good, OK, and poor). These correspond to an A+, A, B, C (and fail) system which the university uses. For summative assessment, I grade each assignment using the rubric and the overall grade is a summation of those assignments.
The rubric was created by the students and myself. We first brainstormed ideas on Padlet (see the screenshot below) and I guided the students to develop various criteria and levels of performance (see Cowie & Sakui, 2016). In this way, the students were encouraged to consider important features of a presentation which they could use in their own work and the goals and outcomes of the course could be ‘constructively aligned’ (Biggs & Tang, 2007).
Using a Google Forms survey, I collect all of the rubrics for each assignment as evidence of learning. The surveys also include student reflections on what they learned, what they found difficult, and how they will change their approach next time. Here is one example after the final presentation of students’ own evaluations. Most evaluate their slideshows as ‘good’ and nobody has said that they are ‘poor’.
In addition to the rubric, I give feedback comments to each student. There are two examples below from the now defunct Google Community. Such comments generally correspond to each feature of the rubric and I try to make them as positive, supportive and encouraging as I can.
Some evidence that my approach to teaching, learning and assessment is successful is that I was the recipient of an Okayama University Teaching award in 2019 (three staff from a total of 2,500 receive this award each year). As a result of the award I made a short video that was shared with all faculty. In this section of the video I comment on the technology that I use for lessons. Subsequently to this video being shown at a university conference I was asked from April 2020 to join a new section, the Centre for Teaching Excellence, which leads the university’s faculty training and development. In addition, I was also asked to join the university ‘Educational Technology Advisory Group’ which is creating a strategy for the university’s use of digital technology. These are new and exciting responsibilities.
Reflection
In 2015, my research partner and I wrote an article about issues and trends in online learning and assessment (Cowie & Sakui, 2015). In that article, we claimed that digital tools can provide alternative assessment possibilities for language teachers, particularly in the area of blended web 2.0 projects. I think that the course described above is one simple example of using readily available digital tools in educational settings, and that encouraging students to create their own rubrics to assess their own projects increases their knowledge of different tools, fosters autonomy, and provides authentic language practice. Creating a rubric sensitized students to different features of a presentation and sensitized me to the barriers and challenges they face. I will discuss these in more detail below after I describe my target learners.
One further point that I have learned from this experience is that courses and tools are rarely set up in an optimum manner. Google Community was an effective option when my university did not have an LMS. However, using it as a tool for assessment was challenging as it is not designed to easily collect information on each participant. A teacher needs to be flexible and recognise what different tools can or cannot do. It is important not to overwhelm students with many applications but it is good to have a selection that can complement each other. In addition, it is clear that many tools disappear, especially free ones. As I mentioned in Core Area 1 it is sensible to try to choose tools that will have some longevity and to try not to be over reliant on any single one.
2. An understanding of your target learners
My students are very knowledgable about their special subject and my role is to give them the confidence and skills to articulate that knowledge in English. In order to do so I have designed courses where students research their own interests (e.g., robots, car engines, soil pollution) and create multimedia presentations on these topics. Very often they have never used PowerPoint or any of the Google tools so I teach them using videos that I make myself and post on YouTube.
I want the students to use English as much as possible to discuss, brainstorm and plan their projects. Where it is not possible for them to do this the technology still allows them to participate actively – they can write scripts, add their voices to slideshows, listen to other slideshows in English and write English comments. In addition, two of the projects are collaborative in that they have to work with a partner(s) using shared Google Slides. This is often the first time for students to experience this kind of project and is very motivating for them (see screenshot below of their post-project comments). Such learning activities are based on constructivist approaches to learning in general (Vygotsky, 1978) and task-based learning in EFL in particular (Ellis, 2003; González-Lloret & Ortega, 2014; Thomas, 2017).
The projects themselves are often very good and here are two that give a flavour of the work:
a) This is a slightly humorous advice video on how to take a train in Japan. I have shown it to foreign visitors to Japan who found it useful in understanding Japan’s train system.
b) One from an agriculture student presenting about a hormone-enhanced ‘supercow’.
Reflection
When I first started using technology with students I assumed that they would have a good knowledge of how to use different tools, particularly common programs such as PowerPoint and Word. However, I fell into the common mistake of assuming that so-called ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001) know more than they do. That view of different generation’s digital capabilities has received much critical analysis (for example, Helsper & Eynon, 2010; Thomas, 2011) and I acknowledge that it is important that I do not assume my students can use digital technology for educational use. Each year I notice that more and more students do have some familiarity with such technology and almost all have smartphones (see Wang, Iwata & Jarrell, 2018) which is important to note. They can use them for SNS, to take photos and use the search functions but it is a challenge to convert those skills to academic purposes. One simple example is the need to teach students to edit videos on their phones and then incorporate them into their multi-modal projects. I have not done this yet but one way to identify prior student experience with digital literacies would be to use the Visitor and Resident Profile (White & Le Cornu, 2011) at the beginning of a course.
References
Anderson, J. R. (2000). Cognitive Psychology and its Implications (5th ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers
Biggs, J. B., & Tang, C. (2007). Teaching for Quality Learning at University (3rd ed.). Maidenhead: McGraw Hill Education & Open University Press.
Cowie, N., & Sakui, K. (2015). Assessment and e-learning: Current issues and future trends. The JALT CALL Journal, 11(3): 271-281.
Cowie, N., & Sakui, K. (2016). The use of rubrics for the assessment of digital products in language learning. In M. Iguchi & L. Yoffe (Eds.) Mobile learning in and out of the classroom: Balancing blended language learner training (pp. 12-17). Proceedings of The 42nd (2015) JACET Summer Seminar. The Japan Association of College English Teachers.
Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford, New York: Oxford Applied Linguistics.
González-Lloret, M., & Ortega, L. (Eds.). (2014). Technology-mediated TBLT: Researching technology and tasks (Vol. 6). Amsterdam, New York: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Helsper, E. & Eynon, R. (2010) Digital natives: Where is the evidence? British Educational Research Journal, 36(3): 503-520. DOI: 10.1080/01411920902989227
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6. Retrieved from: https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
Thomas, M. (Ed.) (2011). Deconstructing Digital Natives. New York, NY.: Routledge.
Thomas, M. (2017). Project-based Language Learning with Technology: Learner Collaboration in an EFL Classroom in Japan. New York, NY.: Routledge.
Vygotsky, L (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wang, S., Iwata, J., & Jarrell, D. (2018). Exploring Japanese students’ e-learning habits. The JALT CALL Journal, 14(3): 211-223.
White, D. S., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171