In the recent article, "The 6 Characteristics of Modern Online Language Learning," Katie Lepi argues that language learning can be done just as easily online. Lepi's article features an infographic from the Spanish MOOC (featured above) that describes all of the activities students complete. I participated in the Spanish MOOC and I only lasted about one day (of course, it was only available while I was completing my qualifying exams). It requires a lot of internal motivation, time, and the ability to figure out how to use all of the tools. The course will start charging $99 per student in the future. It is hard to comment on the effectiveness of the course without taking it in its entirety. However, I did notice that a lot of the grading was done through multiple-choice quizzes and tests. I do like the idea of using Google Hangouts to connect and converse with other students.
Looking at this infographic, I can see how online courses are similar to face-to-face courses. However, I also worry that both online and face-to-face courses focus too much on rote memorization and assessments rather than learning through interaction and authentic tasks. What are your thoughts?
Also, check out this page: Announcement Affecting the Future Offerings of SpanishMOOC to learn more about the findings from their first free course which had thousands of students enrolled.
Interesting, Torrey! I'm definitely curious about the effectiveness of online learning. It seems to me that if there is more interaction involved online courses would be more successful, because I really believe that languages were not meant to be learned alone! Having fill in the blank quizzes as your only form of feedback doesn't seem that helpful! I definitely agree that we need to find better ways of incorporating and ASSESSING more authentic tasks. Memorization, definitely has a certain place, but the memorization should then lead to authentic tasks to test one's ability to USE what was learned. While using Google hangouts is definitely a good idea, I'm curious as to how the monitoring would go, I know my students would be more likely to complete all activities using English rather than Spanish if I weren't there to remind them and guide them with more Spanish. It's definitely useful, probably more so at an upper novice or intermediate level and above though, to use language exchanges with native speakers of the target language to provide more authentic feedback.
ReplyDeleteAlso, thanks for your handy comment on my blog, Torrey! See you later!!