A teacher's framework for online English for academic purposes courses

A teacher's framework for online English for academic purposes courses

The rapid growth of the Internet has led to an increasing demand for online courses that can meet the needs of geographically separated audiences. These courses are frequently delivered and managed using Learning Management Systems (LMSs) such as Blackboard Learn and Moodle, which are already widely used in traditional classroom-based contexts. Teachers and course designers do not, however, always find the transition from classroom-based to online instruction straightforward. The aim of our study was to investigate how teachers managed six 10-week online EAP courses delivered using Moodle, and how teachers and learners reacted to them. We based the study on an existing framework for designing and evaluating courses. We will describe this framework first and then explain how we used it to explore the experiences of learners and teachers involved in the online EAP course.

We will refer to notes from group and individual meetings with the teachers, messages from learners on Moodle Discussion Forums, and records showing the frequency with which each of the Moodle tools was used in designing the course task to suggest an alternative framework which shows how we can match the technology more effectively to what we want the language tasks to achieve. We think this alternative model is also more effective at taking account of the users’ opinions and meeting their needs.

Files associated with this item cannot be displayed due to copyright restrictions.