In this section, I focus on the development of online courses, especially the creation of videos and how to make them as motivating as possible in order to engage and retain students that I will never meet.<\/p>\n
1) Researching the use of digital technology for language teaching<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n In 2012, my research partner (Keiko Sakui) and I received a three-year grant from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. It was to investigate ways to teach languages using digital technology, and meant that we could observe and interview teachers in different institutions in several countries outside Japan such as Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the US. The following are two results of that research: Cowie and Sakui (2013)<\/a>\u00a0is an overview of different techniques that the expert language teachers we met used in their teaching; and, Cowie and Sakui (2014) <\/a>describes a four-part framework that shows different pedagogical approaches adopted by language teachers who use digital technology. These four approaches are: 1) out of class online learning; 2) in-class blended learning; 3) Web 2.0 multi-media projects; and, 4) totally online learning.<\/p>\n It was a great privilege to meet these expert teachers, not all of whom were working in ideal situations, and we were encouraged by them to make something very practical to enhance student learning. Of the four approaches to digital technology that we had identified, we decided to focus on totally online learning as this was something we could do independently from our institutions and was new to both of us. We felt that we could learn the most from this option.<\/p>\n 2) Creating videos for online courses<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n We decided to create courses on the Udemy platform<\/a>. These can be shared for free or purchased by anybody who uses Udemy. The specialist skills we had to develop included planning courses, writing scripts, making videos, adding audio and animation, and putting it all together through editing. The video below explains in more detail this process.<\/p>\n