Ross Woods, rev. 2020, '23
This was originally a planning exercise for an online English program. Parts have been overtaken by online services like Duolingo, but some of it might still be useful.
The simplest place to start is a low-fee, online English course that culminates in the TOEFL test. The target population is university admission candidates with basic high school English, who are mostly older teens and younger adults preparing for TOEFL. (This will prevent setting up separate streams for kids, teens and adults.) It would probably only have one stream at the beginning, based on an automated admission test of reading and listening. The course will be fully online and scalable to very large numbers of students. In fact, the three-year goal should be to recruit and maintain students in very large numbers. The advantages are:
On the negative side:
Full-time or part-time?
At first, most of the demand will probably be part-time students who are already enrolled in a course somewhere else. At least that is the obvious market niche, where it would be easy to do fairly well. It would also appear unlikely that students would commit to full-time study in an online course that they have known only quite briefly without a strong local reputation.
However, the opposite might be true. Competing against other tutoring services in a crowded marketplace might be difficult, where we would have little or no competition in a full-time university course. It is quite plausible that students (and their parents) would commit to full-time study in a US institution that has credible promotion.
Automation
Listening and reading are good candidates for automated education. Writing is also a fairly good candidate. It is fairly easy to test structure in sentence generation, and some specialized software is now available that will help automate assessment of freestyle writing. So far, speaking is the most difficult to automate. In other words, we should require a certain standard of listening and reading before start students on writing and speaking.
What a week looks like
Each week has five study days. A video presenter will offer one new set of online activities for each of the first four days of each week during the university semester. Some will be text-only, some will use only static graphics, some will be audio, and some with be audio-visual. The fifth day each week is a review and assessment activity. Coincidentally, this is very similar to existing campus-based English courses such as ELICOS.
Philosophy
The educational philosophy is mainly behaviorist, which is very different from the currently dominant notional functional approach. (For example, it would reinforce vocab and structures with decreasing frequency.) Even so, behaviorist teaching should not be let degenerate into "drill and kill." It will be difficult to monitor creativity, but easy to help students to be able to generate sentences based on a set of given structures.
A trickle start?
Most likely, we will get an increasing trickle of students, all wanting to enroll as soon as possible after inquiring, and then start as soon as practical after enrollment. A substantial delay would probably deflate their motivation and result in discontinued enrollments and dropouts. Consequently, we should probably plan to start new cohorts quite frequently. This would be quite easy when the fully automated course has been written; we would only need software that would monitor students' log-on.
Main workload
As a provider, the main workload will be:
Relationship with a teacher
People need to feel that they have a relationship with a teacher. In terms of student relations, the main challenge is to create and maintain a personal face to the course. For example, the layout of the course needs enough video of the presenter. The presenter (or perhaps the course coordinator) could provide a personal video message each week with some news and feedback. If we divide students into different groups based on their performance, we could offer a different video for each group. We should do videos in national languages for early stage students whose English is not very good. (An English language video might be more of a discouragement than a benefit.)
Exposure to native English speakers
We need to find out how much exposure to native English speakers students will want. Some will probably want to relate to English speakers as early as possible, and some will want to delay it as long as possible. Some will want it although not ready for it, while others will want to postpone it even though they are ready.
Other characteristics of the course
Key performance indicators
Links (open new windows)
A MOOC on language teaching | LEO, a MOOC for learning English | See also Rachelsenglish.com.
The first semester will use the most basic version of the technology. Later semesters could phase in some particular enhancements:
IELTS and TOEFL are the two main tests of English for university admission. IELTS is predominantly British and Australian, while TOEFL is predominant in North America. The TOEFL online test is easier for us to administer and has lower feess than the TOEFL paper-based test.
DEAC mandates the following minimum scores for university admission:
| Test | Minimum score for admission | |
|---|---|---|
| Undergraduate | Graduate | |
| Paper-based Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL PBT) | 500 | 530 |
| Internet Based TOEFL Test (iBT) | 61 | 71 |
| International English Language Test (IELTS) | 6.0 | 6.5 |
IELTS has a perfect score of 9.0 with separate scores for listening, reading, speaking and writing. Some universites and professional registration bodies specify that each component must achieve a particular score. An IELTS score of 6.0 in academic English is adequate in Australia, but some universties ask for 6.5 and some professions ask for 7.0. The course should aim for something higher than the bare minimum.
IELTS has two modules: General training (e.g. functional English for immigrants) and the academic module (degree threshold and professional registration). Speaking and listening are the same; writing and reading are quite different.
The test comprises four parts:
The ETS website has lots of practice materials and other relevant information.
Some program ideas seem to offer learning solutions for students: forking (different forks for different cultures), mastery learning (so everybody actually gets it), and remedial loops.
Video conferencing will help mitigate against interpersonal shock, which is the aspect of culture shock exerienced when personally meeting someone of a different culture. If we can start with less confrontational kinds of interactions, we might be able to build up to videoconferencing. In other words, we should formulate a series of steps starting with no direct engagement at all and building up to full one-on-one encounter with a native speaker where one is forced to engage.
Language learners typically experience a kind of stress when facing a foreign native speaker of the target language. Consequently, the system needs to help students make the transition to speaking to native speakers with minimal stress and dropout. The proposed way to do so is to take students through a series of increments, so they can be confident and competent at one level before progressing to the next. Generally speaking, transitions are easier with more increments and less gap between them. An example of a series of increments is as follows:
Question: What happens if a native English speaker in a predominantly ESL group drops out? The ESL students might be very disappointed at losing access to a native English speaker.
With thanks to Smiling Campbell
The biggest market is for teenagers and college age young people who are taking a unit of English at high school or university. Their English is generally quite weak.
Adult professional groups often have about the same level of English, but their learning characteristics are quite different. They are also time poor.
We have several options:
• In Indonesia, many students will simply want to be able to pass their high school or university courses.
• We should aim for students to be able to pass the TOEFL on-line test. This is necessary for studies in the U.S. College and graduate admission require different scores.
• ACAS has some Australian accredited units that we can use for English, but see the question below on verifying identity.
• We can also do a full high school/university admission course, but that is quite a different question.
It should be online, self-paced study with automatic feedback from online built-in systems, and online test.
What about specific feedback on writing and/or speaking (Skype and/or Emails). The trick is to simulate it by using automated systems. Giving individualized or small-group personal service does not scale up for larger student numbers. We could only provide it as an extra service, but many Indonesian people could not afford to pay Australian wages.
Good point. Verifying identity is a common unsolved problem for any other online test from unrestricted testing venues.
This is what makes TOEFL such a good option.
The password log-in is only enough for teaching. There are a few things we can do, but they wouldn’t work for this course.
Almost anything purchased comes with conditions about how it can be used, especially revising it.
In the long run, it would certainly be better to produce our own so that we can revise it and use it how we like.
But it requires some planning. I have some ideas on how it could work, but that is a long conversation and I haven’t made any written notes yet. I’ll enclose some that I have.
The university could offer an on-line language laboratory. It would work in different ways according to levels of Internet access, and would be even better on an Intranet:
The two higher levels are synchronous, with the class and tutor all online, and perhaps creating scheduling difficulties across time zones.
On that basis, it is easy to conceive of a wide variety of features within two different modes, one with an online tutor and one without.
Pleasant to listen to and easy to understand.
Heavy accent but easy to understand.
Heavy accent, difficult to understand.
Notes
Senior students could buddy or coach junior students, e.g. M.Ed. TESOL students could coach junior students.
I googled: "language learning activities for adults" and got more hits than I could use. Best sources:
My list of kinds of on-line activities
Other tasks are more complex but more realistic, and often represent a sequence of constitutent tasks. They address the questions: "How do you create meaning-based communication, make tasks more authentic or perceived as authentic among the students? How do you address students’ passive learning style and over-reliance on the teacher?"
Create a situated language learning environment where learners learn to perform a real-world task online by interacting with the computer. As an enhancement, student can be required to design something using multiple data sources. Students not only learn to apply language to a task, but also to notice and manipulate new vocabulary items.
Role Play
Set up specific scenarios in your classrooms, scenarios that your students will likely face. Have one student order a pizza from another student.
Word Lottery
Print out dozens of simple nouns and verbs. Cut them into little slips of paper and put them into a hat or bag. Invite each student to draw two words from the hat and make a sentence. (You can specidy more than two words for more advanced students.)
Other
Use subtitles for lectures, or provide a transcript.
When an ESL course is ready and proven, it could be bundled with an ISP or mobile phone service; we would provide wholesale, and they would provide retail.
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