1B
Technical knowledge
Digital course materials
Google Sites
Since the initial pilots of Google Sites that were discussed in section 1A, I have continued to refine the way in which it is used to present teaching materials. The move to online teaching from March 2020 saw live contact time between teachers and students halved, which naturally led to the Language and Study Skills module, like many courses around the world, starting to explore flipped learning models in greater detail. I think the flipped format of lessons has greatly improved the layout of my Sites pages, as the content focusses primarily on discussion points for the live sessions. The flipped content, outlined in more detail below, is accessed via a button link which takes students to a separate page. This means the pages are more concise and easier to navigate because there's less scrolling involved, something that was criticised in earlier iterations.
The success of the flipped learning model has raised interesting questions for future development. At the time of writing, in April 2021, it is unclear if and when 'normal' teaching will resume. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the flipped model that I have utilised for the Language and Study Skills module has several advantages in terms of how live contact time can best be used. I intend to continue to develop the teaching materials in this way because I feel the ability for students to absorb content at their own pace and the more interactive nature of the classes allow students to learn more in the time available.
The 2020/21 iteration of the Google Sites materials which reflect these changes can be accessed below.
Adobe Inkscape
Adobe Inkscape is a graphic editing package that I began using to design the visuals for the Google Site lessons in the most recent (2020/21) iteration. It allows me to edit and customise vector graphics, which not only look a lot more consistent and lend themselves more readily to illustration, but they also allow me to create infographics that convey information in a more visually appealing way. Images play an important role in teaching materials. They punctuate sections of the page by naturally drawing the reader's eye to important points, acting almost as bookmarks. In earlier iterations of the material, I'd relied on copyright-free image repositories such as Pixabay and Unsplash to break up sections of text with bitmap images. While these are fantastic resources, using vector image sites such as Freepik and Flaticon with Inkscape allowed me to create tailored images such as those in the Site page above, and the infographic on the left.
I had never used graphics editing packages previously, and so I found it challenging to sift through the various platforms available looking for one that had the functionality that I was looking for. After experimenting with GIMP and Krita, both powerful open source platforms, I settled on Inkscape because it was better equipped to edit vector graphics. The whole learning process took countless hours though, in which I absorbed YouTube instructional videos on using masks and layers and tried to apply what I'd learnt to my materials. Ultimately however I found what I'd learned to be both personally rewarding and beneficial to my materials design work. Teachers using the material commented positively on the new use of visuals. In the future I plan to use a more uniform range of images to give the materials a consistent feel. It is also important to bear in mind that infographics need to be made machine readable with alt-text, and that they should supplement the main text rather than carry discrete information independently.
Flipped learning
Blackboard
Blackboard is the default platform for online material at York. As discussed in the previous section, it has some limitations in terms of its aesthetics and functionality. However, during the lockdown summer of 2020 when many of our students returned to mainland China, I had to re-embrace Blackboard because many of my preferred Google platforms such as Sites, were blocked by the firewall. The challenge here was to somehow retain the visual appeal of Sites on Blackboard. This was difficult because Blackboard's default mode of displaying material is to arrange items in a single column on the left hand side of the page. Without getting 'under the bonnet', it's not possible to juxtapose visual elements and to be creative with the page space. As such, I set about implementing solutions to make it a visually more attractive space and by using embedded media rather than documents that had to be downloaded to for the student-facing materials.
Aesthetics: using some basic HTML and CSS, I managed to utilise more of the page space and add some colour to the instructions on the page.
Functionality: to avoid the problem of excessive uploading and downloading of documents, I used embedded third party applications such as those listed below to present student-facing materials.
Developing my proficiency in coding has been a key part of improving my Blackboard pages. I have taken the Future Learn course: Learn to Code for the Web, and have attended workshops such as the one from BALEAP TELSIG which provided valuable basic knowledge to start learning to code.
H5P
H5P enables the production of simple, attractive interactive tasks for flipped learning. Before I adapted the course to a flipped structure using Xerte (see right), I used H5P's objects to embed directly into Google Sites lesson page. This added a dimension of interactivity to the Google Sites pages, and meant that when students were in the physical classroom (and at the time of writing this is but a distant memory!) students could work together on practice activities and problem solving tasks. Although H5P has the advantage of being embeddable, I ended up reworking the materials on Xerte which offered a greater array of activities and was supported by the University. This lesson is from the 2019/20 iteration of the materials, and demonstrates how H5P objects were incorporated into the material.
Xerte
Xerte is a tool for developing online educational content that can be linked out from or embedded in other websites. Learning objects produced with Xerte can be designed around information transmission as well as interactive tasks which facilitate recall and provide opportunities for language production. The learning objects can also be designed to provide instant feedback on activities. These features increase the range of learning that can take place outside of the classroom, thus potentially freeing up live teaching time for discussion. Xerte's learning objects proved popular with students, who reported that they found them to be effective means of studying. Feedback from the teaching team was similarly positive, stating that students were generally coming to classes well-prepared to discuss set topics in more detail.
I was initially frustrated by my lack of progress with Xerte at first. Where there's no WYSIWYG interface, I couldn't see how changes I was making in the editing window were being realised on the published page in real time. This meant that there was a huge amount of trial and error involved, and it took me a long time to learn how to achieve the look that I wanted on each page. I was also slightly overwhelmed at first by the sheer number of interactivity tools that could be deployed. I tried to experiment with all of them where I could, to find out which were more suited to language learning. To help with this, I have joined the University's Xerte user group to share design ideas with users from other departments. This has been invaluable, and has allowed me to see a range of solutions for page layout and use of tools, and my own design practice has benefited substantially. In March 2021 I attended the Xerte conference, which was also a valuable learning experience, gave me a number of new ideas, and to help keep my design practice up to date.
While I found it immensely gratifying to be on this process of constant learning and refinement, the fact that I was always getting better at designing learning objects meant that every time I revisited a lesson that I'd written just a few weeks earlier, I would immediately see where it could be improved and refined; the revision process could be almost endless. I had to draw a line under previous work from time to time and sometimes accept that a lesson was 'good enough'; however, this is not something I find easy to do and often find myself spending too much time 'tweaking' past work.
Language production and feedback
Eduflow
Eduflow is a simple VLE package that has a useful feature called 'flows', whereby the teacher creates a series of events that form a learning process. An example, and the feature I use the most in the Language and Study Skills module, is called the Peer Review Flow. Students upload their work to a submission point, and all submissions are then randomly and anonymously assigned to other students who give feedback via a customisable rubric. The anonymization serves to overcome inhibitions students might have about giving feedback directly, and the fact that it is done asynchronously means that students have time to give a more considered response to their peers' work.
Since I started using this tool on the course, participation in peer review activities has increased. I've run training sessions with other module leaders in the department on how they can make use of its features also, and I plan to expand its use to other areas such as video presentations and portfolios.
Mote
Mote is an audio feedback tool that can be embedded into Google Docs. When teachers leave feedback written in comment boxes, the page quickly becomes crowded and it can be difficult for the student to see which comment applies to what part of their work. Mote mitigates this by allowing the teacher to make a short voice recording which is then attached in the comment box. On a language course it also has the benefit of giving the students an opportunity to practise a different receptive skill (listening). I am still in the initial stages of piloting Mote as a feedback mechanism, and will seek feedback from students at the end of the course as to whether they found it effective. If it proves to have been successful, another avenue to explore is for students to use it as part of the peer feedback process.
Summary
All of the successes that I've had with learning technology has come from networking with colleagues. Internally, colleagues that I work with share ideas in the team chat and in CPD sessions about apps and platforms they've found useful in solving problems or in improving learning opportunities and student engagement. Externally, conference events have been of immense value in the same way but with a broader net; the idea for using Eduflow for example came from attending a TELSIG (Technology Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group) event. As such, for the future I plan to maintain ring-fenced time in the working week to continue attending such events and keeping dialogue open with colleagues. This may be easier said than done. I'm due to start a new role in October which is likely to involve a busier schedule, but for this role I will need to pay closer attention to technological developments in assessment. This is an area where I feel my knowledge needs to be developed more, especially since online assessment methods are likely to be used for at least the coming academic year. I have joined the Testing, Assessment and Feedback Special Interest Group, (a sister SIG of TELSIG mentioned above) and have held discussions with the departmental assessment lead, who is also an advocate of technology in language teaching, in order to keep up to date with developments in this area.
