"Teaching Intensive Courses Online: Creating Authentic Contexts and Community" - Lindsay Preseau, Barbara Besendorfer, & Kayla Weiglein
From Lindsay Preseau
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Session 3 | 1:50pm | Room 2
Presenter: Lindsay Preseau, Assistant Professor
Co-Presenter: Barbara Besendorfer, Graduate Student Instructor
Co-Presenter: Kayla Weiglein, Graduate Student Instructor
Title: Teaching Intensive Courses Online: Creating Authentic Contexts and Community
Description: This presentation will demonstrate how instructors can create authentic contexts and community in short, intensive online courses. We will present a case study based on our 3-week intensive German language course, originally designed to meet five days a week for six hours every day, which we redesigned as an online course. Like many instructors, we were met with the challenge of teaching online with a textbook designed for in-person courses. We will show how, in the absence of online educational materials available for our course, we instead employed authentic online content and contexts to create an immersive, interactive language learning community in our online course. Eschewing contemporary “Web 2.0” educational tools, we returned to more basic methods of online distance education such as WebQuests, engaging collaborative instructional approaches to center community-building.
Abstract: "This presentation will demonstrate how instructors can create authentic contexts and community in short, intensive online courses. We will present a case study based on our 3-week summer intensive German language course, originally designed to meet 5 days a week for 6 hours every day, which we redesigned as an online course. Like many instructors, we were met with the challenge of teaching online using a textbook designed for in-person courses. Research in online language teaching often assumes the use of textbooks and materials already designed for online instruction. However, this is a luxury that was not afforded to many instructors in the urgency of the pandemic; even online textbooks designed for German implicitly assume a hybrid course with some in-person component. We will show how, in the absence of online educational materials available for our course, we eschewed contemporary “Web 2.0” educational tools in favor of returning to more basic methods of online distance education in the form of, for example, WebQuests (Dodge 1995, Žavski 2014). By having students engage in “authentic” online interactions rather than confront a new, unfamiliar set of online educational tools, we were able to jump-start our intensive course. By coupling these methods with more general collaborative instructional approaches (Wingate 2018), we transformed our textbook’s implicitly imagined in-person class into an immersive online environment. Our presentation will consist of three 5-minute segments. Lindsay Preseau will first give a brief description of the course content and design. Barbara Besendorfer will then show specific examples from our textbook which exemplify the issues that instructors face when using materials designed for face-to-face teaching in an online course. Finally, Kayla Weiglein will demonstrate how we employed collaborative, “authentic” materials and assignments in overcoming some of these issues.
Dodge, Bernie. “WebQuests: A Technique for Internet-Based Learning.” Distance Educator, vol. 1, no. 2, 1995, pp. 10-13. Žavski, Mateja. Webquests in Foreign Language Learning. A Cultural-Geographical Scenario for Teaching German as a Foreign Language. vol. 47, Hrvatsko komunikološko društvo, 2014. "
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