Blended learning Case Studies Evaluation
How blended should the modes of delivery be?
Well it all depends on what the learners need and also what facilities are available.
Taking a look at the English for taxi drivers' course, I was impressed with the use of pod casts to supplement the synchronous components : face to face class time, blogs and the internet. Pod casts provided a platform for topics to be practised and revised, the manin aim is the negotiation of meaning. They are however, asynchronous. The aim was for the students to improve their listening and speaking (especially pronunciation skills) in the most efficient way possible and podcasts enabled this.
Podcasts provide flexibility, portability and autonomy and promote active, mobile learning (Kulkusa-Hulme and Shield, 2008). Podcasts are affordable and the technology is easy to use (Rosell-Aguilar 2007).
Exposure to spoken English was crucial for the students. The poor class attendance signaled for a blended learning approach. Functional language was the focus of the lessons. The course content is very relevant and it takes place within their social context and the taxi drivers contribute to it. The situative perspective of learning is present and as the taxi drivers form a community. The fact that the podcast recordings were short allowed the taxi drivers to listen to them during their breaks, thus speeding up the learning process. Listening to the recordings while at work helped them to relate to the material more and retain the information (Mayes and De Freitas 2007).
Incorporating blended learning into the English course helped the students to learn English at a faster rate and gave them a confidence boost, once they had listened and understood the podcast, they felt a sense of achievement.
A flexible approach was taken and the blended learning promoted this flexibility.
Using taxi drivers waiting time to improve their language skills is commendable and the purpose of improving tourists experience of Turkey certainly deserves praise. It is undoubtedly a creative use of ESP. Nowadays, we assume that taxi drivers have smartphones and this would allow for even more ways of delivery. Bax's theory of normalisation came into play, ie. the available technology/resources were used.
Where can we put in learner autonomy? Gruba and Hinkelmann's concept of sustainability is a possible destination. The blog which was created did not allow the students to make entries, therefore it is hard to tell whether the group will remain together after the course.
References
Bax, S(2003) CALL-past, present and future. System 31: 13-28.
Kulkusa-Hulme, A and Shield, A.(2008) An overvie of mobile assisted language learning: From content delivery to supported collaboration and interaction. ReCALL 20/3: 231-289.
Mayas, T and de Freitas, S(2007) 'Learning and e-learning: the role of theory', in Beetham, H and Sharpe, R (eds) 'Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age : Designing and Delivering E-Learning. Routledge, 13-25.
Rosell-Aguilar, F (2007) Top of the Pods- In search of podcasting 'Podagogy' for language learning. Computer Assisted Language Learning 20/5:471-492.
What I liked about this case study was the flexibility it offered students, it was a very clever way of using their waiting time. I think that's what made it successful
ReplyDeleteI agree, especially how "idle time" was used which quite frequently occurs for taxi drivers. One of my concerns on this case study is if the asynchronous use of podcasts is a good “match” for the taxi driver’s needs. Their communicative needs are person to person and thereby inherently synchronous.
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