13083s

13083s

Student Presentation (20 minutes)

Hery The, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA, hery@hawaii.edu
 * Applying self-study approach to evaluate an online-distance course **

"For an international student who want to study in the English speaking countries, language proficiency is one of the requirements of enrollment. These prospective students spend lots of time and money to increase their language testing scores from private institutions either in their home-countries or the host countries. With the advancement of technology, open access, and online-distance learning, these prospective international students can save their time and money if they know how to make used all these resources and tools to benefit their learning. To mention, some of these cost-free language learning resources and tools are Livemocah, BBC Learning English, Grammar Book, and LEO Network. This list can be extended to include large numbers of video and podcast.

Utilizing these cost-free media, in the Fall 2012, collaborating with the Kertarajasa English Club (KEC) in Indonesia, I had designed and delivered an online-distance course from Hawaii. This course is delivered by combining the Skype Call and Join.me. I also tried to use the Schoology as the course management system. This course was named KEC Conversation. The purpose of this course is to facilitate the undergraduate students at Kertarajasa Buddhist College to improve their self-confidence to speak in English. Assisting by two local facilitators, the senior students at this college, the class met every Friday morning, Indonesian time, from 09:00 am to 10.30 am. The course included 7 synchronous and 2 asynchronous meetings.

The aim of this presentation is applying the self-study approach (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009) to evaluate my teaching practice in this online-distance course. The self-study approach is one of qualitative research method genres in which teachers or educators analyze their teaching practices. The self-study combines the elements of practices, theoretical frameworks, and experiences to develop the scientific analysis. Explicitly, in this presentation, I would like to report the challenges of designing and delivering the course, analyzing the plus-delta of my teaching experiences, assessing students formative achievement through the course, and identifying the potential topics to include in the improvement of this course. The primary data to support the analysis are the course artifacts.

Participants who interested in teaching-learning language with technology, online-distance education, and best practice in technology application are the target audiences of this presentation. This presentation, in addition, can be used to share the challenges that participants had in designing, delivering, and improving online-distance courses. I believe that there are some similarities in experiences, but there are many invaluable uniqueness of the online-distance learning applied world wide in the different countries. The interplay between locations, cultures, technology, political system, social-economics, and many other factors will become a source of many stories about online-distance education to tell and to learn from one another. My presentation, in this case, is a bridge for the conversation between online-distance learning educators. I would like to use the primary points in my presentation to become a starting point for participants to share about their experience on mentoring the use of technology, challenges and difficulties in facilitating the class, and providing support one another to the problems."

All Audiences online-distance course, international, web 2.0