Social presence is the degree to which an individual feels real or is seen as real while studying in an online context. The higher the degree of the learner’s social presence in a VLE, the lower the probability of the learner not finishing his/her studies.
It looks like more and more language teaching is being done on the web. Let me summarize what online language teachers have on offer, what they do or could do in theory. I will list several examples from Curtis J. Bonk & Ke Zhang’s (2008) Empowering Online Learning, pp. 62-63. Types of resources & activities for online language learners online flashcards electronic dictionaries...
Heather McKay & Abigail Tom (1999, CUP, Teaching Adult Second Language Learners, pp. 21-22) suggest teachers differentiate among four types of mixed-ability activity. Unless the text is in quotation marks, it is my own interpretation. same input, same task What is different in this situation is the level of your students’ language proficiency. What makes it possible for the students to...
Does studying 1-to-1 qualify as pairwork? And is it necessarily teacher-centered and bad? Anyone?
According to research, e-learners are likely to be frustrated by
technical difficulties
communication breakdowns
Source: Hara., N (2000). Student Distress In a Web-Based Distance Education Course.
Ian Forsyth (Teaching & Learning Materials & The Internet, 3rd edition, p. 135) defines interactivity as
emulating the traditional classroom
He lists the 5 Ts that cause interactivity to fail on the Internet (pp. 19 -23)
time
technology timid
territoriality on topics
training
truss – an infrastructure requirement
Let me list some of the topical issues that keep emerging and need to be addressed asap. usability – what I mean here is all the extra clicks that either my students or I make, which takes time. Distributing courseware in space often results in learners’ having to spend more time online than they would otherwise have, and that should be avoided. feedback – it is not enough to...
The opposite of hyperlinking is RSS aka really simple syndication. Users find content on the web and hyperlink to it . The opposite is subscribing to syndicated content aka RSS feeds. RSS readers are also known as aggregators. Metadata or metatags are usually embedded in website code, are not visible to the eye, are added by website content managers, are arranged by taxonomies, are structured...
To begin with, I am not aware of any reliable statistics. I can only draw on my personal experience and summarize a number of related Google search results. It is obvious, I hope, that it is impossible to spend more than 3 clock hours talking without a break. I guess that’s the maximum. As for the minimum, an online lesson can be as long as a regular phone call, i.e. it can last for as...
