The future of distance learning is calling

03/08/2011

Research carried out recently among a group of students enrolled on a distance MA Tesol course at Leicester University offers a glimpse into a not-too-distant future when learners distributed around the world but linked via the internet will be able to enhance their learning experience with the use of some simple and low-cost digital tools.

Gabi Witthaus, who teaches on the MA Tesol course, collaborated with colleagues in the university's psychology department on the "Duckling" (Delivering University Curricula: Knowledge, Learning and INnovation Gains) project to find out how a relatively small group of their distance- learning postgraduate students would respond to using audio tools, the Second Life virtual world and e-readers to share and develop their learning.

The results have been positive, with e-readers in particular, she says, allowing students to open "little windows of time" to access course content. But it is the potential offered by voice tools to transform the isolated experience of distance study that Witthaus is most excited about.

Like many online distance MA Tesol courses, Leicester's uses a virtual learning environment – a closed website via which students can access course content and keep in touch using a text-based message board. But with a simple voice recording program and headphone-and-mic sets it is possible for students to add audio clips to these message board postings.

This functionality is already used at Leicester to add audio demonstrations of phonological items, but as part of the trial students and teachers were encouraged to post feedback about their work and exchange messages.

"It was incredibly successful," Witthaus said. "Audio feedback gives the students the sense of their tutor as a real human being."

She says tutors began to create a more effective, time-saving combination of text and audio. "They found they could write quick little annotations on students' essays and then elaborate more in the audio feedback."

The research also revealed that students appeared more willing to listen to feedback via audio than to commit time to reading written comments.

The "voice board" also allowed students to interact among each other in new ways. "Students said they really enjoyed listening to one another and that they read more widely because they could hear their peers express enthusiasm for texts. They also said that they put more effort into their audio submissions because they knew fellow students would be listening and they didn't want to appear stupid."

The web-based service Skype has offered synchronous voice communication via the internet for some time and many MA Tesol tutors use it to speak directly to distance students. One other interesting result of the research was how communication could still be effective when it was asynchronous, particularly for study groups spread across different times zones.

This was most apparent with the use of Second Life. Instead of attempting to get student to congregate, in their avatar personas, in some part of the vast virtual world at the same time, the teaching staff identified where language learning was going on in SL and instructed students to carry out observations of what was happening in these virtual classrooms.

On one hand this extended the usual observational skills MA Tesol students need, and on the other, it allowed students to develop insights into the rapidly developing concept of virtual learning.

The observations Witthaus and her colleagues made of how the students used e-readers – on to which they could download course content and specialist linguistics textbooks, thanks to the support of a leading academic publisher – allow her to make her most confident prediction about how distance MA Tesol studies are going to develop.

"MA Tesol students are very mobile. As teachers many of them have moved away from their home countries to teach somewhere else," she said. And the demands of combining distance study with full- or part-time teaching add to the demands on their time, which is why they found the ability to access reading content on a simple, portable device a real boon.

"The e-readers fitted into their lives. They didn't necessarily replace print or their laptops or smartphones, it just fitted in. They used them in contexts where it worked for them."

So next time you sit next to an MA Tesol student at a bus stop, don't be surprised to find them engrossed in a lot more than just a game on their mobile phone.

By Max de Lotbinière

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