teaching
Marjo Joshi
Abstract
Online teaching is often considered to be less motivating than traditional classroom teaching, and it is criticised especially for the lack of interaction. Teachers need new skills and ways of engaging and motivating students to study online. They also need to find ways of adding interaction into their online courses.
This article presents live online meetings as an integral part of an online course, and further discusses the use of live online meetings as a means of engaging and motivat-ing students through added interaction between course participants and the teacher.
In addition, this study presents students’ opinions on the use of live online meetings through the results of an online questionnaire that they were asked to complete at the end of the course.
The case presented in this study is an online course ’Presenting in English Using On-line Tools’ delivered in summers 2015 and 2016, which is based on a balanced blend of Optima Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and Skype for Business Online Meeting system. The purpose of the Optima VLE is to serve as a base for materials – work in progress, background materials, and finished coursework, whereas most of the interaction will be conducted in various types of live online meeting. The purpose of the online meetings is to add cohesion between group members, increase student
In addition, it also gives the students an authentic environment where to learn com-munication skills using modern technology that are applicable in working life.
The results of the survey seem to indicate that the students have a positive attitude towards the use of live online meetings as part of an online course. The students felt that the use of live online meetings added interaction between course participants as well as between teacher and student. In addition, they felt they were more engaged in the course because of the live online meetings. Many of the students agreed that live online meetings could be integrated into other online courses.
Introduction
Blended learning methods are fast becoming the norm of teaching in most higher education institutions (HEIs). Combining online elements into traditional class-room teaching can enable participation of those students who are working, study-ing abroad or otherwise interested in distance study options. In addition, blended learning methods give teachers new possibilities supported by technology in giving assignments, facilitating discussions, collaborating and assessing in virtual learning environments (VLEs). In addition, most HEIs offer full online courses in addition to blended learning. Indeed, full online courses offer students and teachers alike a chance to learn without restrictions of time or place.
It is therefore unfortunate that online learning is still often mistaken for a lonesome task of sitting in front of a computer, reading texts posted by the teacher and writing messages to someone who may or may not read them. However, this should be con-sidered as a one-sided view of online teaching, as asynchronous communication is only one part of a well-planned, implemented and executed online learning process.
Students want to be challenged, motivated, engaged into learning, and they recog-nise the need for that in virtual environments as well. They get confused by poorly designed and supported online courses, and instead appreciate well-balanced design and content with support from the teacher to lead them further into the depths of the subject at hand. Harasim (2012) has written about the transformation into a new learning theory where collaboration is the key element to all activities that enable learning. Salmon’s (2011) models for online design offer an approach for incorpo-rating all elements into one package. Teachers need to be supported in the transfor-mation into the new course design, collaboration and the use of new technologies in order to support the students in their learning in return. This is all combined in
three elements of knowledge critical to success in online teaching: pedagogical, tech-nological and content knowledge (Mishra & Koehler 2006), which all support each other and cannot fully function without one another.
Online teaching is still seen by many teachers as a difficult task that requires much more resources and effort than traditional face-to-face teaching. One common com-plaint one hears of online teaching is the claim that online teaching lacks the kind of possibilities for interaction that only a face-to-face situation in the classroom can bring. According to Kullaslahti (2012), teachers in universities of applied sciences consider online teaching challenging in many ways: when assessing their skills in online teaching, they evaluated their skills in using voice and video in collaboration especially low. Therefore, teacher training for online teaching is particularly impor-tant in making teachers see the possibilities that VLEs and technology can bring, when combined with pedagogical solutions that have been selected for online learn-ing specifically. Unfortunately it is still the case that some teachers simply transfer their materials and methods into the VLE, without realising that the VLE, with its own restrictions and possibilities, requires its own pedagogical approach that sup-ports learning in a different context from a traditional classroom.
In order to engage students and facilitate real-time interaction to simulate the ben-efits of face-to-face classroom teaching sessions, live online meetings should be inte-grated into online courses. Synchronous face-to-face communication on an online course can bring the benefits that some teachers feel are lacking when the teaching does not take place in a traditional classroom environment. Live online meetings can be utilised in as many ways as face-to-face situations in the classroom: teachers can give instructions for an assignment, they can give feedback and guide students, they can meet to discuss progress in group work, they can assess the student’s work in one-to-one meetings. Also, equally important is to acknowledge that they can en-courage students to meet each other in live online meetings without the teacher, and thus create cohesion amongst the study groups themselves (eTUBE Online 2015).
In the current study, live online meetings are used to refer to a synchronous on-line meeting that utilises video and voice connection as well as a shared screen, and takes place in a technology-supported environment (Skype for Business, previously known as Lync; and Adobe Connect).
The purpose of this article is to illustrate the importance of the live online meetings in creating engagement and interaction on an online course. Experiences and
exam-ples are drawn from a full online course ‘Presenting in English Using Online Tools’
offered as an elective summer semester course at Turku University of Applied Sci-ences (TUAS). More specifically, the objective of this study is to find out if students felt that during their online course the use of live online meetings added interaction and engagement to the course, and in return also enhanced their motivation, added to their learning experience or contributed to the achievement of their learning ob-jectives.
The author of this article will first present the methods of data collection, as well as the technologies and methods used in the live online meetings. After that the results are presented, followed by a discussion on engagement and interaction on an online course. The conclusions present the most important points that can be drawn from the study and make suggestions for further research.
Methods
The case used to investigate the role of live online meetings adding engagement and interaction on an online course, ‘Presenting in English Using Online Tools’, was a full online course that was offered to all TUAS students as an elective sum-mer semester course in May–June 2015 and again in May-June 2016. The course description stated that there were no classroom meetings on the course, and that the students would be required to have synchronous online meetings using differ-ent technologies. Another specific feature was that the course focussed fully on oral communication, thus written assignments were kept to a minimum, and all assign-ments were framed around the oral, face-to-face communication in the live on-line meetings. Naturally the main objectives of the course, which were presentation skills, English communication skills and the use of online tools, provided a great platform for the current study (SoleOPS 2015). The course objectives were the same for both years 2015 and 2016, in order to maintain the same starting point for the course and the present study.
The study is a quantitative methods study using an online questionnaire. Students participating in the course were asked to answer an online questionnaire, with ques-tions ranging from practicing language and communication skills in the live online meetings to working in small groups. The questionnaire was completed using a We-bropol form, and the answers were anonymous. The answers show student experi-ences and preferexperi-ences in using live online meetings as a part of an online course.