I would seriously welcome feedback on this.
Basically I'm looking at 2 areas; PD for teachers OTOH and language acquisition OTO.
1.) To use an online learning environment for PD:
Opportunities:
For a complex of reasons, TEFL is not a particularly rewarding commercial proposition for a business. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, given the apparent massive demand, but in reality in the TEFL business margins are low & business failure rates are high. Many institutions run their TEFL programs at break even or as a loss leader to more remunerative educational programs (tertiary & VET, with their huge staff-student ratios and low number of contact hours are at least relatively low in labour costs). One side-effect of this is that EFL teachers are (outside the tertiary sector) generally extremely poorly paid, in an attempt to reduce labour costs, and very little investment is made in professional development, to reduce operating costs. Entry requirements to the profession are very low, so the typical EFL teacher is under trained, inexperienced and unsupported formally within the workplace. (And possibly a tad cynical). I'm looking at ways that we could, as an industry or as an employer, improve the development & support opportunity for staff to; improve their work experience, and potentially their motivation and commitment, both short & long term; to improve their classroom performance and consequently the learning experience of their students; to encourage and support debate of the ethical dimensions of TEFL.
Strengths:
if it is possible to great the sort of community energy that exists within certain, say, Facebook, communities, then the advantage an online system would have is the ability to knit together groups across multiple campuses & multiple shifts; also potentially across multiple employers, although then (see Threats) there comes the question of who is going to finance the network (if finance is required). A very large number of staff rooms in EFL-ville are not particularly happy places, for a complex of reasons within the culture& economics of the industry - see opportunites. Fragmentation of staff is common, as is the casualisation of the workforce; thus it's difficult for teachers to form relationships & leverage off them. When we review the large number of EFL communities that do exist online, they generally seem to function primarily as a clearing house for resources, rather than relationship-facilitators. I actually have observed first hand (at a large multi-campus school I managed in China) staff using Facebook as a way to establish and maintain community sensibilities, although admittedly for social rather than professional reasons.
Establishing communities goes to the core of motivation & long term commitment, but it also creates a platform for mentoring & PD relationships. Importantly, when an online platform for PD gives a great deal of potential for, is the re-use of mentoring & PD materials. Privacy, I think, has to be maintained in a mentoring relationship, but nonetheless, if a mentor creates sample work to illustrate a discussion, that work can be easily sued. The observation process is challenging for a lot of new teachers (and threatening wouldn't be too strong in many cases, having implemented an observation program into an ESL school where one had never previously existed), but videoing a class & posting the video for online discussion with a mentor is significantly less threatening. IN this case the remoteness of the online experience actually becomes a strength.
There is an enormous opportunity to develop learning support materials for online/digital use. I doubt that anyone seriously questions the potential of digital tools to do this; where the process usually falls down is that it more difficult/expensive to develop those tools than anticipated in project budgets. But, for example, pronunciation is very challenging to teach successfully & one of the main reasons is that actually the majority of teachers don't actually understand it particularly well. It's a complex subject glossed over in most teacher training. Visual tools & animations are tremendously helpful in both explaining the topic & exploring pedagogic strategies; an online PD environment is obviously well suited to such tools. Another advantage of the online environment is the possibility of fragmenting such training into what is specifically useful for a particular class - teachers feel themselves to be time-poor, and often resent resent PD as too remote.
Weaknesses:
Setting up an online community doesn't create one. The same reasons that teachers find it unnecessary to enter into a F2F community will militate against an online community. People will need to anticipate some tangible benefit. Non F2F relationships can, perhaps, more easily suffer from routinisation; the mentor who has a "standard message" which they email on a calendar basis to their proteges. As I've noted in a blog post elsewhere, online communication is actually slower & less responsive then F2F communication; this runs the risk of increasing alienation & anxiety in an online community over a 3D community.
Threats:
Money, maintenance overheads, training, infrastructure failures, external communities threaten internal communities & vice versa, politics. (Nothing major :))
2.) Online language learning
Opportunities:
My particular interest in online language learning is actually political, although it overlaps significantly with economic arguments. The boom in the popularity of the "communicative methodology" for language teaching has meant a significant increase in class cost. For the price of a grammar-translation textbook a student is lucky to receive one communicative class. This increase in cost of language acquisition, at a time and in a world where keywords of economic success are "globalisation" and "English", results in the raising of a barrier to participation in the global economic community to an increasing number of people. The question is, can online learning increase access to, and participation in, global English-language-based economic activity.
Strengths:
There are two major strengths, and a potentially significant - but possibly difficult to quantify advantage to an online language learning methodology. The obvious one is economies of scale, meaning that materials developed can be reused an enormous number of times, amortising the cost of their production to the negligible. This can be simply & persuasively illustrated by comparing existing commercial computer-based language programs, such as Rosetta Stone (USD $999 as per their website on April 15 for English) , with the cost of pursuing an equivalent proficiency (IELTS 6.5) via face-to-face tuition ($360 per week, face price, Ability Education*, over 40 weeks, $14400).
The second major strength is the possibility of exploiting technology to deliver very precisely student-targeted training,with a consistency that human teachers would struggle to emulate. Although the teaching of pronunciation is an ideologically fraught issue in TEFL, my view is that outside the TEFL industry itself, minimal accent speakers are more highly regarded, and that this regard translates into a general increase in estimation of a speakers ability (and, often, sadly & wrongly, the speaker's intelligence). Pronunciation is largely a mater of drilling, with consistent modelling & useful feedback. Given the idiosyncrsy of pronunication issues&the time it can take to tacklethem, it is notpractical fora human teacher to undertakeiton a classroom basis. However, repetiiotn & consistency are not problematic for a computer. There are many such potential areas where twchnology may provide better modelling &feedback.
The third.more nuanced claim, is that potentially online language training might be more ideologically neutral than actual language teachers. Language & teaching are both tools wielding power, and frequently, with inexperienced teachers, or teachers lacking insight, or, sadly, abusive teachers, this power is used to benefit the teacher and not the student. Teaching English is inevitably, perhaps, a kind of colonial action & it would not be possible to remove all power from any language program; however an online program has the potential for abuses to be negotiated out, or at least down, and the (presumed beneficial) outcomes of those negotiations to be instantly available to all students.
*I work there; in reality student pay between $220-$250 after discounts
Weaknesses:
I think it is a long time in the future that computers will be "communicative".Those elements of language acquisition that are deeply communicative, such as the negotiation of meaning, the setting and achieving of goals, the relevance of context and social relationships will be difficult to emulate in software. To the extent that these are indispensable, the online training program cannot hope to be complete.
It is not at all clear that the online infrastructure required to deliver this kind of program does, or can, extend far beyond the range of existing language classes, that is, a cashed up middle class.
Threats:
Software has much promise, but fulfilment is not so easy. Cost of developing programs that meet the goals of this project may be prohibitive. There may also be significant political objections to the extension of a globalising language process into communities that are perceived, or perceive themselves, as having cultural identities under threat. Finally, it should be noted that that CBT may not be able to deliver truly effective language training.
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