Schedule: 2009-09-11 (12:00 - 12:45)
Parallel Session 1 (Room A-30)

Title: Enabling technology-wary language teachers to create sophisticated learning modules
Authors: Oranna Speicher
Abstract: As part of its e-learning strategy, our School of Modern Languages developed in cooperation with the University’s Learning Team, a web-based language platform - the One-Stop-Language-Shop (OSLS) which provides multimodal language learning materials for all students registered in the School. The OSLS represents a central point that gives students access to language learning materials across 14 languages and several levels of competence. The OSLS represents a self-access platform. Its materials mirror the curricula of both the academic departments and the institution-wide language programme, the Language Centre. The OSLS allows each language student at the SML to move between levels and, indeed, languages.

An essential part of the rationale behind the OSLS was to make sure that it didn’t stagnate once it had been created, but that the language teachers in our School become largely self-sufficient in the creation of further resources for the OSLS rather than having to rely on the availability of the University’s Learning Team. However, it soon became apparent after consultation with teaching staff that such a level of autonomy would not be achieved with the initial set of mark-up tools. These had turned out to be prohibitive for the average teacher as they harboured potential and frustrating pitfalls such as getting hold of updated versions of the mark-up tools, having to save the marked-up content as XML files, managing a large amount of files and folders in various directories and finally to transfer all the necessary files and folders to a remote web space. In order to eliminate such pitfalls the creation of learning modules had to be made much easier and quicker to afford the less technophile teachers the opportunity to include e-resources into their teaching. This step-change resulted in the development of a web-based tool suite which now lets teachers create learning modules in one go. The annotated content (text, audio and video) is still stored in XML files and can therefore easily be reused in many different exercises without additional authoring, thus allowing for the source file to be exploited fully. To avoid potential technical problems, however, teachers will never have to create, modify or save those XML-based content data files. At the end of the creation process, the teacher will receive one URL which they can then pass on to their students.

The web-based tool suite lets teachers annotate text, audio and video content to fit with many different exercise modules. Teachers have also the option to retrieve and modify part-of-speech information for any text. This POS information can then be used with different exercise components to create POS-based exercises. The teacher only has to select the POS to be blanked out.

After having annotated the learning content, teachers can directly test content created with any of the available exercise modules. The Content Creator module of the tool suite can then be used to create learning modules with the content just annotated. These learning modules can directly be tested in the OSLS interface.
Keywords:

Main topic: Curriculum development for CALL.

Biodata: Oranna Speicher German Tutor/E?Learning Development Officer The Language Centre School of Modern Languages and Cultures The University of Nottingham
Type of presentation Paper presentation

Paper category (Other)

Target educational sector Higher education

Language of delivery English

EU-funded project No

Schedule:	2009-09-11 (12:00 - 12:45) Parallel Session 1 (Room A-30)
Title:	Enabling technology-wary language teachers to create sophisticated learning modules
Authors:	Oranna Speicher
Abstract:	As part of its e-learning strategy, our School of Modern Languages developed in cooperation with the University’s Learning Team, a web-based language platform - the One-Stop-Language-Shop (OSLS) which provides multimodal language learning materials for all students registered in the School. The OSLS represents a central point that gives students access to language learning materials across 14 languages and several levels of competence. The OSLS represents a self-access platform. Its materials mirror the curricula of both the academic departments and the institution-wide language programme, the Language Centre. The OSLS allows each language student at the SML to move between levels and, indeed, languages. An essential part of the rationale behind the OSLS was to make sure that it didn’t stagnate once it had been created, but that the language teachers in our School become largely self-sufficient in the creation of further resources for the OSLS rather than having to rely on the availability of the University’s Learning Team. However, it soon became apparent after consultation with teaching staff that such a level of autonomy would not be achieved with the initial set of mark-up tools. These had turned out to be prohibitive for the average teacher as they harboured potential and frustrating pitfalls such as getting hold of updated versions of the mark-up tools, having to save the marked-up content as XML files, managing a large amount of files and folders in various directories and finally to transfer all the necessary files and folders to a remote web space. In order to eliminate such pitfalls the creation of learning modules had to be made much easier and quicker to afford the less technophile teachers the opportunity to include e-resources into their teaching. This step-change resulted in the development of a web-based tool suite which now lets teachers create learning modules in one go. The annotated content (text, audio and video) is still stored in XML files and can therefore easily be reused in many different exercises without additional authoring, thus allowing for the source file to be exploited fully. To avoid potential technical problems, however, teachers will never have to create, modify or save those XML-based content data files. At the end of the creation process, the teacher will receive one URL which they can then pass on to their students. The web-based tool suite lets teachers annotate text, audio and video content to fit with many different exercise modules. Teachers have also the option to retrieve and modify part-of-speech information for any text. This POS information can then be used with different exercise components to create POS-based exercises. The teacher only has to select the POS to be blanked out. After having annotated the learning content, teachers can directly test content created with any of the available exercise modules. The Content Creator module of the tool suite can then be used to create learning modules with the content just annotated. These learning modules can directly be tested in the OSLS interface.
Keywords:
Main topic:	Curriculum development for CALL.
Biodata:	Oranna Speicher German Tutor/E?Learning Development Officer The Language Centre School of Modern Languages and Cultures The University of Nottingham
Type of presentation	Paper presentation
Paper category	(Other)
Target educational sector	Higher education
Language of delivery	English
EU-funded project	No