Reflecting Online English Classes with EdTech

Yukie Saito (Chuo University)

The spread of Covid-19 required me to teach university classes online; however, as a teacher who promotes EdTech, teaching a course online has become valuable. I was in charge of one reading course for first-year students at a private university in Japan, where I set its objective as being able to use English as a tool for global communication and acquire ICT skills. In this presentation, I will share how I conducted classes using ZOOM and a Learning Management System(LMS) to achieve the objective. In the first part, I will talk about three major tasks of the course, group discussion about topics from TED talks, individual TED Talk presentations, and group presentations to propose a solution to one social issue. In the second part, I will share what challenges I faced during the course, such as changing from one LMS, Google Classroom, to another LMS, which the university adopts and how I overcome the challenges. At the end of the presentation, my reflection of teaching the online class will be presented based on the results of a questionnaire survey related to the course objective which was made with reference to CEFR / CEFR Companion Volume (COE, 2001, 2018) and Information literacy & ICT Literacy needed in the 21st Century (Griffin & Care, 2015). As a final remark, how the experience of teaching online will be a valuable experience for my future journey as a teacher will be presented, which I hope will be pedagogical implications for other teachers.