When Teaching is Learning: A Personal Account of Learning to Teach Online
TIM LEWIS
The Open University
The Open University
Abstract
This article is aimed at educators who find themselves facing the need to develop their e-teaching skills, with little or no formal training or institutional support. It explores how this can be achieved using the notion of teacher autonomy in combination with standard professional development measures for language teachers. The article recounts an attempt to develop my own e-teaching skills, within the framework of an 8-week collaborative project. In the course of this project, I learned to use synchronous audiographic conferencing software (Lyceum, as developed by the Open University (OU), U.K.) in combination with an asynchronous virtual learning environment (WebCT) to teach English for specific purposes to a group of 14 Masters degree students in a French university. Largely unfamiliar at the outset with the pedagogic use of the software, I consider how critical analysis and reflection (by means of a teaching journal) can be used in combination with observation by a critical friend to inform pedagogic decisions in pursuit of a nondirective approach to teaching and learning. I also address the affective dimension of such a process, especially the stresses to be dealt with by the novice tutor in a multimodal environment. Where there are limits to the approach adopted, I identify those limits.
KEYWORDS
Audiographic, Autonomy, Online, Pedagogy, Reflection
INTRODUCTION
This article is addressed to educators who find themselves faced by the need to become e-teachers or e-moderators, but to whom little or no formal training or institutional support for the development of online teaching skills is available. In an ideal world, such individuals would be relatively rare. However, Hampel, Felix, Hauck, and Coleman (2005) point out that “tutors are often thrown into such environments either against their will or without sufficient training” (p. 9). In such circumstances, they will have little alternative but to fall back on their own resources in learning how to develop their online teaching skills.
I have recent personal experience of learning to teach online as part of a research project designed precisely to explore the effective use of online tools and pursue the development of e-pedagogies. The project used standard reflective instruments (i.e., a teaching journal) and a range of action research methods (i.e., observation by a `critical friend' and discussion with a network of colleagues) for purposes of professional development (see Pring, 2002; Richards & Farrell, 2005). Student focus groups and critical event recall were also used but are not reported on here because transcription is still ongoing. Instead, I aim to give a balanced but critical account of the three development tools mentioned (teaching journal, peer observation, and discussion forum) in order to help others in similar situations find ways of developing their own online teaching skills.
I approach my task with some ambivalence. Richard Smith (2000) writes that “teacher-learning in general is inevitably a career-long, largely self-directed enterprise” (p. 96). However, should it be? Clearly, if institutions require their employees to deploy new skills, it is their duty as responsible employers to provide appropriate training; and, as Michael Wallace (1998) points out, `action research' may be seen by some teachers as simply transferring onto their shoulders one more responsibility in addition to those which already burden them. Against this position, however, are ranged successive traditions, including curriculum and action research, reflective practice, and teacher autonomy, which view reflection on one's own professional activity as a key ethical responsibility for the teacher. In the words of Lawrence Stenhouse (2002)—the moving spirit of curriculum research,
The outstanding characteristic of the extended professional is a capacity for autonomous professional self-development through systematic self study, through the study of the work of other teachers and through the testing of ideas by classroom research procedures. (p. 32)
Nor is that responsibility simply directed towards one's own professional self-development. What distinguishes action research from its forerunner, as articulated by Stenhouse, is the conviction that, while findings of action research are not generalizable in the classical sense, nonetheless the lessons learned in one environment may have transferability and value—however provisional—in another and that sharing them with colleagues is therefore a worthwhile act. No one has expressed this idea better than Richard Pring (2002).
`Action research' aims not to produce new knowledge but to improve practice—namely, in this case, the `educational practice' in which teachers are engaged. The conclusion is not a set of propositions but a practice or a set of transactions or activities that are not true or false but better or worse. By contrast with the conclusion of research, as that is normally conceived, action research focuses on the particular. Although thereby not justifying generalization, no one situation is unique in every respect and therefore the action research in one classroom or school can illuminate or be suggestive of practice elsewhere. There can be, among networks of teachers, the development of a body of professional knowledge of `what works' or of how values might be translated into practice - or come to be transformed by practice. But there is a sense in which such professional knowledge has constantly to be tested out, reflected upon, adapted to new situations. (p. 33) It is in the spirit expressed by Pring that I offer the following account.
THE ODIL/COPEAS PROJECT
The ODIL (Outils et Didactique pour les Interactions en Ligne) project is a large-scale collaborative interdisciplinary research project, involving language teachers, applied linguists, teacher trainers, and computer scientists funded by the French Ministère délégué à la Recherche et aux Nouvelles Technologies. It involves four French institutions, the Université Stendhal, Grenoble, the Université du Maine, Le Mans, the Université de Franche Comté, Besançon and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Lyon II, as well as the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology of the Open University (OU). The project runs from October 2004 to March 2007. Although the teaching phase of the project is now complete, what follows below is a description of the other work in progress.
The project has two broad sets of aims. The first one is epistemological: to improve our ability to describe and analyze linguistic and paralinguistic interactions in online pedagogic settings. This, it is assumed, will enhance our understanding of the behavior of interlocutors in such environments and will enable us to ascertain the strengths and weaknesses of the communication tools in question. The second group of aims is praxeological: to improve the performance and use of existing online pedagogic tools and to inform the design of future tools for e-teaching and e-learning. A further aim is to formulate recommendations for the technical and pedagogic training of e-tutors.
If e-pedagogy is a central concern of the ODIL project, nowhere is this more so than in the subproject Copéas (COmmunication Pédagogique en Environnement orienté Audio Synchrone). The Copéas subproject concerns in particular two ODIL partner institutions, namely the Open University and the Université de Franche Comté. Its aim is to compile and analyze a multimodal online corpus of learner-teacher interactions. Clearly, the generation of such a corpus presupposes the existence of a program of online learning and teaching. The Copéas project therefore involves three groups of participants: learners, teachers, and researchers.
Learners
The learners were a group of 14 students who were studying for a Masters degree in open and distance learning at the Université de Franche Comté. The course (Master FOAD) is intended for those who plan to pursue a career in education and training, whether in the private or the public sector. One of the distinguishing features of this course of study is that it combines the development of both technical and pedagogic knowledge and competences, in an attempt to produce ingénieurs pédagogiques who can bridge the gap which exists between these two domains and which has been so wasteful of resource. Course regulations prescribe the study of a foreign language (L2), and the course must include at least 25 hours of L2 use. Our project offered a way of meeting this requirement. Broadly speaking, it aimed to enable learners to develop a critical understanding of web-based learning while simultaneously helping them talk and write about the web in English.
Since the Master FOAD provides both initial training for recent graduates and in-service development for practicing professionals, its students vary considerably in age and background. The seven students in the tutor group on which the present account focuses ranged in age from their early 20s to their 50s. All had French as their mother tongue. Four were themselves either trainers or teachers, though not in languages.
To establish levels of L2 proficiency for placement purposes, students assessed themselves using the DIALANG descriptors associated with the Common European Framework. On the whole, they identified their skills as being at the A2/B1 level—on the beginning/intermediate borderline—apart from one individual who consistently rated himself at level C (expert). In practice, however, the seven learners dealt with here fell into two informal subgroups, one of which had only a basic level of spoken proficiency, while the other could converse with some fluency.
Teachers
The two teachers in the course were English native speakers from OU's Institute of Educational Technology and its Department of Languages. Both had experience of teaching languages, including English as a foreign language. However, while one of them was extremely familiar with teaching and moderating online (not least as a tutor in OU's M.Ed. in Open and Distance Learning), the other—myself—was a newcomer to e-teaching. For teachers, the project offered a professional development opportunity, giving them the chance to gain experience of teaching with Lyceum.
Researchers
Three of the four researchers in the Copéas project were members of two research laboratories of the Université de Franche Comté (the Laboratoire de Sémiolinguistique, Didactique et Informatique and the Laboratoire d'informatique), while the fourth came from OU's Department of Languages. For researchers, the aim was to investigate multimodal online interaction. I alone had the rather ambiguous status of a participant/researcher.
Course Content, Duration, and Delivery
The Copéas course was intensive, lasting approximately 2 months, from January 17 to March 8, 2005. Students engaged in 60 to 80 minutes of tutor-led synchronous online discussion per week. (The Copéas course used a combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning environments.) It is likely that they spent a similar amount of time preparing for the synchronous Lyceum sessions. In addition to taking part in the collective activity in Lyceum, roughly half of them also posted individual work in WebCT. The course objectives required learners
1. To agree on a framework for evaluating an aspect of web-based learning;
2. To create a set of design guidelines for educational websites, based on the above framework;
3. To develop their ability to use (primarily spoken) English for subject-specific purposes;
4. To familiarize themselves with Lyceum and its properties; and
5. To develop their ability to compare Lyceum with similar environments.
After an initial ice-breaking session, the syllabus focused on critiquing a succession of educational websites through the prism of such standard criteria as context, authorship, and authority; design principles and features; technical structure; level of interactivity; and quality indicators. Learners then moved from reviewing websites to formulating their own guidelines for educational website design and thence to an evaluation of the two environments they had themselves been using.
The Lyceum System
The Lyceum system is a piece of synchronous audiographic conferencing software developed at OU's Knowledge Media Institute used to support and deliver e-learning across a range of disciplines (for a detailed description see Buckingham-Shum, Marshall, Brier, & Evans, 2001). OU's Department of Languages has progressively introduced Lyceum-supported versions of all its language courses. Since Lyceum was intended to be simultaneously the principal learning and teaching tool of the project and one of the main objects of students' scrutiny, it is worth describing the environment at some length (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
Lyceum Initial Screen with Different Rooms, List of Participants, Talking and Voting Buttons, and Recording Controls
The Lyceum system is in effect a virtual classroom. Its key components comprise one audio and four visual modules, as follows.
Voice Conference
The voice conference module permits synchronous audio-conferencing between groups of up to about 15 people (this is a practical recommendation rather than a technical limit). Names of all those present appear in a white box to the left of the screen. The identity of the speaker is apparent at any given moment since a small microphone symbol appears against his or her name. Undue overlapping can be minimized by clicking on a “raised hand” symbol. This indicates that the person wishes to take the next turn. If there is a queue of would-be speakers, the name of the first in line is displayed above the white box with a number indicating how many others are waiting their turn once the person has finished.
Document
The document module is essentially an onscreen word processor. All those logged in to a session in Lyceum can write to the document module simultaneously. Of all Lyceum's modules, the document module has proven itself to be one of the most useful for collaborative language learning because it offers the possibility of the joint composition of texts, an activity which also tends to give rise to negotiation either in the voice conference or the text chat modules (see below).
Concept Map
The concept map allows users to collate ideas or keywords in a shared space using differently colored nodes. It is particularly useful for brainstorming (see Figure 2).
Whiteboard
The whiteboard is a kind of digital flipchart on which it is possible to draw shapes, write text, and even insert photographic images using a facility called the screen grab.
Text Chat
The text chat module offers a near-synchronous written-chat facility which assumes a particular role in the overall combination of elements within the system as a whole. It can be used of course for written interactions, and it can also be used to carry out sound checks or check other audibility problems. It is also useful for reinforcing spoken comments, task instructions, or spelling individual words and expressions. More sophisticated users tend to use it as a back channel, supporting metacommunicative commentary on interactions in the voice-conference module. Sometimes, however, the content of text chat is unrelated to the topic of the voice conference, which can be confusing, especially to new users of Lyceum.
Voice and text chat run in parallel and synchronously with whichever other modules users have selected.
Figure 2
Lyceum Screen with Lobby, Teaching Room 103, Text Chat, and Concept Map
Recording
The Lyceum system offers tutors the capacity of recording any session. Both students and tutors have equal rights of access to most of its other tools.
Use of Lyceum
Within the project, Lyceum was used for a range of online spoken and written interactions. Pairs and small groups of learners met in it to prepare work. Weekly teacher-led sessions with larger groups normally culminated in a collaborative writing activity. One of the main pedagogic advantages of Lyceum for language learning is the opportunity it offers for interaction in both spoken and written forms. The latter is particularly important for less advanced learners. In the present project, when given a task to complete in subgroups, the less orally proficient subgroup showed a marked tendency to use the text chat module instead of the audioconference module. I am unable to say whether this was a matter of competence or confidence. Nevertheless, it is clear that using voiceconferencing on its own demands significant levels of both. One of the advantages of Lyceum is that it provides less advanced learners with a textual safety net for spoken communication.
WebCT
The WebCT course management system is widely established and well known education software. In this particular project, it was used for the unexciting but vital task of course management. Six folders in WebCT were employed.
Diary Folder
The diary folder contained the course dates and schedule of classes.
Presentations Folder
The presentations folder contained minibiographies of the students and teachers (but not researchers) taking part in the project.
Guidelines Folder
The guidelines folder contained three documents of key importance to the project.
1. The student guide contained the course outline with details of each week's scheduled activity.
2. The document “Reviewing Educational Websites” outlined criteria and procedures for evaluating websites.
3. The list of educational websites document provided of a list of EFL websites for review by students.
Mail Folder
The mail folder was used for email messages between tutors and students.
Discussion Groups Folder
The discussion groups folder contained four groups:
1. General (for everyone),
2. Tutor Group 1,
3. Tutor Group 2, and
4. Private Teacher Research
Shared Documents Folder
The shared documents folder had three folders:
1. Tutor Group 1,
2. Tutor Group 2, and
3. Private Teacher Research
Use of WebCT
The WebCT system is not supported by OU, so no training in its use was available. Folders were of varying degrees of usefulness. Dealing with students whom I had not met personally, I found that the presentations folder was very helpful in giving me some details about the people I was tutoring. Indeed, I printed its contents and kept them in front of me while teaching. The guidelines folder should have been of central use to students because it gave a detailed account of each week's intended activity. However, it actually seemed to be little read by them. I consequently resorted to sending out weekly reminders using the discussion forum set up for my tutor group. The shared documents folder contained the results of the diagnostic test which learners had administered to themselves before the start of the course. It was also used by students to submit their “homework” individually. This often occurred even when they had been asked to prepare a collaborative activity for the synchronous conference session. My teaching journal (week 2) records my reaction in the following terms:
Journal, Week 2
I didn't get the sense that they had really worked as teams. … I can't help thinking … that there's some cultural difference here. I think if I gave a task to English students to work on as a team, more or less the first thing they'd do is sit down and work on how and when they'd get together to do it. Instead, my French students simply seem to post their work as individuals in WebCT.
To what extent students' unwillingness to work collaboratively was a matter of cultural difference, I am still unable to say. The French university system even today—partly for cost reasons—tends to favor a transmission model with the cours magistral as its principal instrument, thus conditioning learners to individual responses. Nevertheless, these students were accustomed to project work in teams as part of their course. I learned later that one of the students (an experienced teacher of mathematics in an international lycée) had been equally puzzled by this reluctance to work collaboratively.
TEACHER AUTONOMY
There are two broad views of what is meant by teacher autonomy. As Richard Smith (2001) explains, teacher autonomy has been traditionally identified with “being free from external constraints on one's teaching” (pp.1, 3). In the same vein, Phil Benson (2000), who refers to it as a right, sees it as the “freedom from control by others” (p. 112). Ian McGrath (2000) equates teacher autonomy in this sense with “the exercise of professional freedom” (p. 100).
Another, more recent, view of teacher autonomy is not quite so sweeping. No longer a right, teacher autonomy is actually associated more with responsibilities. Implicit in this conception is the view, expressed by Danièle Tort-Moloney (1997), that teaching itself is “a developmental learning process.” Tort-Moloney, a Vygotskian, sees this process as “dialectical … intrapsychological and interpsychological” (p.21). For her, an autonomous teacher is “one who is aware of why, when, where and how pedagogical skills can be acquired in the self-conscious awareness of teaching practice itself” (p. 51). Richard Smith (2001) echoes and expands on this, defining teacher autonomy in this guise as the “ability to develop appropriate skills, knowledge and attitudes for oneself as a tutor” (p. 9). Both Smith and McGrath equate it with the capacity for “self-directed professional development” (Smith, p. 3; McGrath, p. 100).
While accurate definitions are undoubtedly indispensable, so too is some consideration of the ways in which autonomy, particularly in this second sense, makes itself manifest in specific actions and behaviors for two reasons. First, as McGrath (2000) pointedly remarks, autonomous teachers are “those who have the capacity and freedom for self-direction and have demonstrated that capacity” (p. 102). Second, and even more fundamental, one of the paradoxes of autonomy—whether that of learner or teacher—is that it is not an automatic attribute. Of the knowledge associated with teacher autonomy, Tort-Moloney (1997) declares “no-one has that knowledge spontaneously; it needs to be developed by research” (p. 51). McGrath concurs: “if … teacher autonomy is seen … as an important element in teacher professionalism, we need to understand more about how it develops … and also how it can be facilitated through teacher education programmes” (p. 110). That is arguably the object of the present paper.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
An awareness of the notion of autonomy on its own will not suffice to bring about change in teaching behavior. For changes to occur, specific mechanisms, readily found in the literature on professional development for teachers, need to be engaged. Three instruments for self-development are considered below: a teaching journal, an online discussion forum shared by teachers and researchers, and peer observations by a `critical friend.'
The Teaching Journal
McGrath (2000) views the development of teacher autonomy as a matter of rising levels of awareness. For him, the development of teacher autonomy is associated with greater perceptiveness and a shift of focus from the other to the self. At an initial stage, McGrath assumes, the teachers' attention will be fixed primarily on external realities, such as the requirements of the inspector, the expectations of the head of department or school, and the performance of the students themselves. Inasmuch as teachers focus on themselves, they will be preoccupied with how to cope with such external factors as preparing their students for the final exam or the need to work through the text book. At the second stage, teachers' attention will turn to their own role in managing students' learning, so that those needs and wants are met. At the third stage, teachers will be able to focus squarely on their own professional development. At the same time, they will show an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what is taking place. From merely describing students' self-directed learning, teachers will come to reflect first on their own development towards autonomy and finally on their own growing awareness, autonomy, and professional development.
In the present project, the prime instrument for recording awareness was a teaching journal in which entries were made weekly, after each Lyceum session, from weeks 1 to 7. (Unaccountably, no entry was made in week 8.) Though McGrath's account of the different levels of awareness at which teachers operate seemed intuitively accurate, the pattern of observation in my teaching journal was rather different from what McGrath proposes. This was charted by the simple expedient of taking each paragraph of the diary and numbering it according to the phase in McGrath's scheme to which it corresponded. Some paragraphs contained reflection both on my own teaching and on the learners' activity and were, accordingly, given two numbers. Where a paragraph dealt with learners, a decision had to be made on whether it contained reflection or mere description.
My teaching journal failed to follow the path towards teacher autonomy charted by McGrath. In week 1, for example, five paragraphs (out of five) were devoted to reflection on my own teaching, while only one contained reflection on my students' activity and development. In week 7, by contrast, reflection on my own development (having never filled fewer than four paragraphs in weeks 1-6) appeared in only two paragraphs (out of five). In the same week, reflections on my students' performance and development were featured in all five paragraphs. Only in weeks 5 and 6 of the project did my diary contain anything that can be regarded as straightforward description of students work (one paragraph out of six in each case).
If there is a pattern, it is not a transition from description to reflection. Reflection is present from the beginning and remains largely constant throughout. Nor is there an inward transfer of attention from the other to the self. If there is a discernible trend, it is the opposite of this: an outward shift of focus from myself to my learners, leading both to some description of their development and to a greater amount of reflection on it.
My journal may be atypical. But this does agree with my own recollection of what it was like to be a novice teacher, when one is initially preoccupied almost entirely with oneself and only subsequently becomes able to observe and reflect on the activity of one's students. Being cast into an unfamiliar situation where I simply had to learn how to e-teach subjected me to a kind of regression. On reflection, it seemed as though all the classroom management skills I had acquired over the years suddenly counted for nothing online. This was distressing. What I commented on with almost monotonous regularity was not so much what had happened in the class as how I felt about it. In week 1, for example, I noted,
Journal, Week 1
I … felt rather like I used to two decades ago, going into the language classroom and floundering around for 60 minutes … . The overwhelming sensation … was one of stress, anxiety and some irritability.
Even in week 7, when the focus of the journal had largely shifted from myself to the learners, my entry begins,
Journal, Week 7
I found myself rather disappointed by this session again, so I guess that the rollercoaster that the Odil course seems to have been will carry on until it's all over.
I do not know if my journal would have assisted me in becoming more autonomous as a teacher had I been able to keep it for longer. I rather doubt it. In fact, it was begun as a means of stress management. In this respect, it served its purpose well, acting as a kind of a barometer for my emotional state throughout the project. It aided both contemporaneous and retrospective reflection. But charting awareness, especially of an affective kind, does not of itself offer a means of taking action in the pursuit of one's professional self-development. In this sense, the keeping of a journal on its own was of limited use.
Shared Experience: The Discussion Forum
The keeping of a teaching journal was a personal initiative. Within the project itself, a private discussion forum was set up in WebCT to encourage teachers and researchers to share their experiences. In effect, setting up the discussion forum was an attempt to form a small community of practice. This seemed entirely appropriate since one of the avowed aims of the ODIL/Copéas project was to help develop e-pedagogies and especially since both educators taking part in the teaching did so with a view toward professional development. The forum was set up during the planning stage of the project in November 2004. However, it delivered rather less than it promised, both in the quantity and quality of postings. In fact, in a period of 16 weeks, from November 24, 2004 to March 7, 2005 (the final week of teaching), a mere 18 messages were posted. Both teachers on the project posted five of these while its two main researchers posted four each. While the distribution of messages between these four individuals was quite even, of the 18 messages, 10 dealt with administration (e.g., forum etiquette, student self-evaluations, student attendance, arranging meetings, and altering teaching arrangements), one was a personal message, and one dealt with student performance. Only six messages dealt with the experience of teaching in Lyceum. All of these six messages were posted between January 19-29, 2005, and focused on the first two teaching sessions of the course. Teacher 1 posted one message, and teacher 2 posted two messages. Researcher 2 posted three messages (all responses to the teachers' messages). The messages reported on activities covered in a session and dealt with the technical affordances of Lyceum (e.g., sound quality, voting, and inability to see or `thread' the text chat. Two dealt with aspects of pedagogy (tutor 1 on threading, tutor 2 on nondirectiveness). After this initial flurry of messages, the flow dried up.
The reason for this lack of activity in the forum may have been a matter of personality. I recall that I felt ill at ease committing to this rather uncertain forum the same thoughts and feelings that I had written more privately and uninhibitedly in my journal. Perhaps my fellow tutor felt similarly. On the other hand, perhaps it was a matter of the way in which teaching and observation were organized. The teachers did not observe each other's sessions and therefore could make no comment on them. Researcher 2 observed only teacher 2's teaching and thus could make no comparisons between the sessions. As a teacher, one could post messages about one's sessions, but it was hard to see the point of doing so.
The Critical Friend
By far the most productive of the strategies used for professional development within ODIL/Copéas, was that of having a `critical friend' observe my Lyceum sessions and give me feedback on them. In my case, the `critical friend' was an experienced teaching colleague with a thorough knowledge of Lyceum software and was able to offer both technical and pedagogic advice. As one of the researchers on the project, she recorded the sessions and often listened to the recording before commenting, which almost certainly meant that the level of feedback received was more accurate and more detailed than it might have been in the case of a `live' observation. The feedback I received after the first session contained technical and pedagogic advice in roughly equal measure
Technical Advice
The most embarrassing piece of technical advice I received was a comment on my attempt to use the voting system in Lyceum.
Observation, Week 1
Just re-listened to the sound track, and at one point you said: “If you can hear me, click yes, if you can't hear me, click no”. (lol!)
I took good care not to make that particular error again. Another piece of technical advice also offered on that occasion was
Observation, Week 1
Your sound check may not have been thorough enough. Your mike sounded to me as though it was too close to your mouth, hence a certain breathiness, which obscured some of your phonemes.
As a result, at the start of a Lyceum session, I now routinely take care not only to check my audio levels, but also to adjust the position of the microphone and to check routinely with interlocutors how well they can hear me.
Another item of technical advice that I found easy to implement was
Observation, Week 1
Whiteboards and other assets: have these open ready in the relevant room before the session and teach the students to toggle between them via the top-of-the-screen rectangles.
In fact the only piece of technical advice issued after this session that I have not been able to master is:
Observation, Week 1
More silences as you were typing in the box or doing other manipulations. I'd always tell them what I'm doing and why there is a silence. You did this at one point, towards the end. But note that if you hold CTRL and SHIFT simultaneously, it depresses the TALK button, leaving your right hand free to activate the mouse and open screen (assuming you're right-handed!!!). Takes a bit of practice, but you can practise alone any time you like.
Useful as this information was, I am afraid I never found it possible to set aside time to practice the technique in question. Perhaps it just involves too much multitasking.
Pedagogic Advice
The pedagogic advice offered by my critical friend was equally valuable, though I sometimes found it less easy to implement. Performing technical manipulations is a simpler matter than changing ingrained teaching habits. Even where our views of what was pedagogically appropriate coincided, making the changes seemed to take time. In week 1, my critical friend first suggested organizing the learners into smaller groups where they might find it easier to work together.
Observation, Week 1
If this had not been Session 1, and you had known them well, it may have been possible to send R off with C or G to another room, having first asked C or G to act as helper in English. After all, they are teachers! But you would have had to have visited that room fairly soon afterwards, to ensure that things were not making C/G unhappy.
This was good advice, but took me 5 weeks to implement. Another piece of pedagogic advice issued by my critical friend concerned time management.
Observation, Week 1
You spent an awful lot of time on R, leaving the others silent for far too long. In such a situation, maybe give the others a mini-task, having of course told them that this is to allow you time to help the one that's in trouble? And send them to a side room to do it.
It sounds excellent, but I never quite managed to do this, in the form suggested by my critical friend. Nonetheless, it certainly made me more conscious of the need for time-management. After the first week, I structured sessions more rigorously, so that there were no periods when groups of learners were waiting idly for me to finish dealing with one of their classmates. And when a technical manipulation caused me to fall silent, I learned to inform them of what was taking place.
SKILLS GAINED
IT skills
Most obviously, the Copéas course enabled me to learn to use two pieces of software, Lyceum and WebCT, neither of which I had previously employed for teaching. A specific IT skill honed during these two months in both environments was file transfer.
Perhaps my biggest gain in terms of IT skills was a measure of multimodal competence. As a multimodal environment, Lyceum makes serious demands on the ability of learners and teachers to multitask. For both language learners and teachers, this may be exacerbated by the cognitive demands imposed by using a language other than their L1. Hampel et al. (2005) quote one of their learners as saying,
They [the tools] were easy to use in practice sessions and alone but manipulating documents etc at the same time as attempting to speak/write German led to mistakes or inability to use full capacities of programme [sic]. Familiarity with regular use would solve some of these problems. (p. 13)
As a teacher, I experienced very similar feelings to these. In week 1, my teaching journal refers no less than four times to the fact that I simply found myself unable simultaneously to use all the modes available to me. The entry will suffice to illustrate the point.
Journal, Week 1
In my use of the features in Lyceum were [sic] limited in the extreme. (No whiteboard, no concept map, it felt just like going back to chalk and talk, only without the latter [sic, for `the former'], because the text chat window is slightly more cumbersome to manipulate than a stick of chalk.)
As I became gradually more familiar with the Lyceum environment, feelings of stress, bewilderment, and inadequacy subsided to the point that, by week 6, my journal entry indicates that I at least felt at home with multimodality.
Journal, Week 6
I feel quite relaxed about these two sessions: I feel much more at ease with the technology than I did initially.
One concern remains. I needed roughly 6 weeks' practice (approximately 8 contact hours) to begin feeling at ease with audiographic conferencing. Gilly Salmon (2003) describes a training program involving 10 hours online presence over 5 weeks. By way of contrast, Associate Lecturers in languages at OU receive between 3 and 5 hours of tuition in Lyceum use before being expected to be able to use the tool for language teaching. While the specific amount of time required to become familiar with an online teaching medium will vary for each individual, it would seem wise to allocate a rather longer period to acquainting our e-tutors with Lyceum than is currently the case.
Pedagogic Skills
The first and most basic pedagogic technique acquired in delivering the Copéas course was to learn to talk slowly. It seems an obvious skill, especially for language teachers, but it is even more crucial online, where learners are unable to see one's lips. It required practice.
Another online pedagogic skill I had to learn was dealing with silence. Hampel et al. (2005) indicate that tutors new to Lyceum experienced feelings of anxiety, occasioned by unfamiliarity with the tools and odd feelings of “operating in a vacuum” stemming from the long silences which occur quite frequently in this environment. I was no exception. At first, I overcompensated by talking too much. In my journal, I record,
Journal, Week 4
I've … tended to speak too much in discussions—to dominate them even. The interaction is very teacher-centred, rather like a question and answer session (with me as the interrogator). Not a good pattern.
Learner silences online appear to be of several kinds. The project team is using critical event recall to explore them, and they will be reported on in more detail in due course.
Another skill—or quality—learned in the course of the project was that of simplicity. Salmon (2003) suggests that the ability to simplify the questions one asks of learners in an asynchronous conference is a key skill for e-moderators. She cites “an experienced e-moderator and trainer of e-moderators David Shepherd” as saying,
When training e-moderators to create online activities …, we have noticed that they have a tendency to ask a whole series of complex questions in one message. Such a strategy may work well in face-to-face situations, where the facilitator can pick up on any response and manage the discussion by moving on to the questions in turn. But online all participants could (in theory at least) respond to all questions, asynchronously, in any order. (p. 61)
Simplicity is, if anything, even more fundamentally necessary in e-moderating synchronous conferences, especially where the primary mode is auditory rather than textual. My journal records my struggle to acquire it.
Journal, Week 3
I still overcomplicate at times. … For the future, more simple questions like “Is that good or bad?” … They can always be followed up with a “Why?”
In the same week, my critical friend echoed Salmon and Shepherd in suggesting two techniques for achieving simplicity.
Observation, Week 3
Your preambles to some of your questions are still too complicated, and I might suggest writing them down in simple form to have in front of you as you speak. … One principle to watch for is avoiding asking 2 questions in one, which leaves them unsure which to answer.
A fourth aim which I pursued throughout the Copéas course was that of ensuring higher levels of learner/learner interaction. I finally achieved this in week 5 by taking the simple step of dividing my students into small groups. In doing so, rather than acting directly on my critical friend's advice, I was employing a strategy recommended in particular by Mällinen (2001), that of replicating good classroom practice online. The success of this is recorded in my teaching journal.
Journal, Week 5
Both groups had approx. 30 minutes of interaction - whether predominantly written or predominantly spoken, with very little intervention from me
In week 6, my critical friend comments
Observation, Week 6
The level of interactivity between the people is gradually getting better. From my `multimodal' point of view, there were some nice examples of interplay between the chatbox, the document, and the audio. From the point of view of task design, it worked reasonably well.
Qualified praise, perhaps, but an acknowledgment nonetheless of the distance I had traveled towards a goal I had set myself at the outset.
CONCLUSION: FROM AWARENESS TO ACTION
In any account of learning to teach online, as in any other aspect of teacher self-development, the perhaps rather tenuous relationship between the capacity for autonomy and actual changes in teacher behavior will be of central concern, as will the effectiveness of the specific instruments employed to bring about behavioral change. I should therefore like to conclude by evaluating the relative contribution of each of these.
First of all, what role did my awareness of the concept of autonomy play? Smith (2001) argues that the most appropriate purpose of teacher autonomy is to enable teachers to direct their own learning in such a way as to foster autonomy in their learners. That is a long-term process. The tight time scale (2 months) of the project described here offered only limited scope for this. It was perfectly possible, however, within the 2 month period of time to seek to reduce the amount of teacher-centered interaction and to explore ways of increasing levels of interaction among the learners themselves, which I did. What the concept of autonomy enabled me to do was to identify this as a goal and to explore ways of achieving it. Awareness of autonomy also meant that I was prepared for and enjoyed engaging in a learning dialogue with both my students and my critical friend. It gave me the confidence not to feel threatened but, rather, to recognize what changes were needed and to bring them about.
If autonomy helped me in setting myself a goal, the instruments I used to try to achieve it were derived from established teacher development practice. Little was new about them, except that it was I—rather than a teacher-trainer—who initiated them.
Of the three procedures used, one—the sharing of experience—was relatively ineffective. For whatever reason, the discussion forum in which this was supposed to take place never caught on.
Keeping a teaching journal, on the other hand, had a number of benefits. It enabled me to manage stress, monitor my attitude to e-teaching, record events for both contemporaneous and subsequent reflection, and engage in critical analysis. In other words, it raised awareness. However, it did not of itself help me to implement changes in the way I was dealing with the group of learners for which I was responsible.
Most effective in this regard was the advice I received from my critical friend. I believe this was crucial in enabling me to embark on the most significant phase (for me) of autonomous self-development, the passage à l'acte. It offered specific pieces of practical advice, which I was then free to implement, if I wanted to and was able to. Many dealt with aspects of the session to which I had also attended in my journal. The combination of my own heightened awareness plus an external prompt seemed particularly powerful in bringing about action.
My conclusion is that both an understanding of autonomy and an awareness of some of the established means of professional teacher development are necessary for focused, effective teacher learning. An awareness of the former may be useful in enabling novice online tutors to identify their own self-development goals. It can also give them the confidence needed to take responsibility for changing the way they do things, and to do so in dialogic collaboration with their learners and others. Nevertheless, they will also need to consider what practical means they can best employ to achieve their self-development goals. Many of these are relatively easy to put into effect. Any of us can keep a journal, and most of us have a trusted colleague who would be willing to observe our e-teaching and provide feedback. All we need is a clear sense of what we hope to achieve by doing it and the confidence not to feel dependent or inadequate in asking for help.
