Abstract

The English Language Program at the University of Alberta developed and offered a Web-based course in English conversation.  The students were graduates in Pharmacy at Toho University in Japan who were preparing to travel to Canada for clinical orientation seminars in hospitals.  Courseware was largely based in HTML and derivatives, presented through WebCT.  Oral conferencing was facilitated through Wimba Voice Boards, accessed through WebCT.  Orientation tutorials were available to students through WebCT, based on Power Point slide shows converted to Java format with Impatica for Power Point.

The courseware performed well but scheduling issues and changing student preferences limited the effectiveness of the course.  The coordinator of the project learned that design and development of Web-based courses requires an unexpected amount of time and related resources.  If the required resources are not available for the development process, issues such as scheduling and student consultation may be squeezed out of the process.

Introduction

Web-based language instruction is an emerging field and conversation instruction is one of its most innovative variations.  Web-based ESL instruction and learning are an extension of several pedagogical disciplines that are well supported in academic literature.  Computer assisted language learning has been practiced and documented for several decades (Higgins & Johns 1984).  Web based learning, including language learning, has been similarly treated since the popularization of the World Wide Web and related technologies (Swaffar et. al. 1998, Warschauer 1995 and Prescott 1989).  The practical experience of developing a Web-based ESL conversation course, documented here, often extended into areas that are weakly attested in the academic literature.  Anderson and Garrison (1998) refer to the “profound effect” (p 97) of new developments in communications technology on distance education.  The phenomenon of rapidly emerging technology ensures that IT mediated learning processes often outstrip the literature.

The English Language Program (ELP) University of Alberta (U of A) in Edmonton, Canada has offered classroom-based ESL courses since 1973.  Course offerings include part-time evening courses, a full-time intensive day program for intermediate students and a full-time EAP program for international students entering credit-degree programs in Canada who require English upgrading.  The evening courses include course offerings to meet specific needs; conversation, pronunciation and exam preparation. 

ELP management developed a multiuse CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) facility in 1997 and about two years later initiated a Web-based program.  The decision to start a Web-based ESL program was informed by several factors: Web-based instruction was seen as an extension of the ELP’s “digital environment” (Miller 1996, see also Negroponte 1995); the ELP’s CALL program provided a base of expertise with computer-mediated instruction, both among instructors and program managers; expansion of the classroom-based courses was hampered by limited space on campus; and a Web-based program would allow the student base in the ELP to continue expanding without the limitations of crowded classrooms.  Also, the university and the ELP offered substantial support services for Web-based programs. 

Background & Chronology

In the summer of 2002, the ELP was approached with a request to offer Web-based instruction in English conversation for graduate students in Pharmacy at Toho University in Japan.  The Japanese students were scheduled to travel to Edmonton in May 2003 for clinical orientation seminars in regional hospitals.  The Pharmacy program coordinators believed the students would need some English language upgrading in order to work as pharmacists in Canadian hospitals, but they did not want to enroll the students in ESL classes in Canada because of the cost of travel and accommodations and the limited time available for the Pharmacy “Clinical Orientation Seminars”.  As a result, the project coordinators looked for an alternative to classroom ESL instruction in Canada and chose a Web-based English conversation course offered by the ELP.  The objective was to upgrade the students’ English listening and speaking skills with all learning activities focused on areas of professional interest for pharmacists.

The salient features of the Web-based course were determined in the fall of 2002.  Instruction and learning activities would be contained in three modules reading, listening and speaking.  Students would interact with an instructor at the U of A to complete activities in the reading and speaking modules.  These learning exercises would enable the students to generate brief written or oral reports that would be used in activities in the “Speaking” module.  Speaking activities were facilitated by asynchronous exchanges on  “Wimba voice boards”, a product that enabled asynchronous oral chat groups.  Students would give oral reports on the voice boards, based on information gleaned from the reading and listening activities.  The technology for this course was new, although it had been used in courses and pilot tests in the ELP. 

In March of 2003, a professor from Toho University visited the U of A and the course objectives and schedule were given final approval.  After the professor returned to Toho University, the number of students was finalized at three and each student was given logon IDs and orientation lessons to access the courseware through the Web.  In the first scheduled week of the course, the students completed assessment exercises and were oriented to the technology of the courseware and the WebCT virtual classroom.  The course continued successfully for several weeks, with good participation from the students.  Midway through the course, the students requested a change to more informal topics instead of activities focused on professional and academic subjects.  After some discussion, the changes were made and the course continued until the end of week six.  After week six the students began to prepare for their journey to Canada and participation ended.

The course design

Program and pedagogical design

The entire program, “Clinical Orientation Seminars” and English language upgrading, was under the supervision of two professors of Pharmacy, one at Toho University and the other at the U of A.  The Web-based English conversation course was developed and delivered by the Academic Technology Coordinator in the ELP (the author), an ESL instructor with both Web-based and classroom experience.  A small number of instructors at the U of A were available as coaches for informal conversation activities and a computer and network specialist was available on the Toho campus for technical support.  The number of students was expected to be eight to twelve, but administrative issues beyond the control of the ELP reduced the final number to three.  All participants, except for the ELP coordinator and one of the conversation coaches, had little or no experience with web-based learning.

The curriculum was informed by theories of communicative language learning familiar in the ELP.  As a result, the medium of instruction was English without Japanese translation services from the ELP.  The course began with several assessment exercises.  The curriculum had been designed from an estimate of the students’ proficiency levels and fortunately these proved to be accurate, so no major revisions of the curriculum were indicated from the assessment results.  The assessment exercises were similar, although simpler in structure and user features, to the weekly lesson material that followed, so they doubled as orientation to WebCT and related courseware.  After completing the assessments, the students showed little difficulty in completing the learning activities.  All activities, assessment and learning, were presented in a common pattern of user features and were “relentlessly consistent” as recommended for computer game design (Forum Nokia 2003).

WebCT and HTML

The Web-based course was delivered through the medium of WebCT, provided by Computer and Networking Services (CNS) at the U of A.  Courseware was built in HTML with DHTML, JavaScript and Macromedia Flash inserts.  DHTML was used to send assignments to instructor E-mail accounts, outside of WebCT, through a form-mail service provided by university.  JavaScript was used to validate assignments, ensuring that relevant data such as names were included.  Macromedia Flash held the sound recordings for listening assignments (see Figure 6 in “The Listening Module”.)

The course architecture was designed with simple and clear menu structures (Figure 3), with ‘one stop shopping’, a single menu for most scheduling information, and redundant links for access to assignments.  This user-friendly simplicity was considered critical for success because of the students’ lack of experience with Web-based courses and their limited ability to communicate in English (Forum Nokia 2003).

Wimba and Impatica

The Wimba Voice Boards (http://www.wimba.com) were used as Web-based applications for asynchronous oral conferencing and were provided by the Language Resource Center at the U of A.  The Wimba Voice Boards were accessed through links in a web page in the WebCT courseware (see below “The Speaking Module”).

Student orientation to the technical features of the courseware was provided through a library of ‘Tutorials’, available through an icon on the course home page (Figures 1 & 2).  Each tutorial was composed in a Power Point slide show and converted to a Java based presentation through a software product “Impatica for Power Point” (http://www.impatica.com).  The Impatica slide shows progressed through orientation presentations with mouse clicks, and students are able to move efficiently from the slide shows to WebCT features.  Both Wimba and Impatica slide shows were accessed through WebCT with no significant complications. 

Figure 1 – The course home page in WebCT

Figure 2 – A page from an orientation tutorial, in WebCT and Impatica

Figure 3 – The course schedule

 The reading module

            The reading module was accessed directly from the schedule (Figure 3) or from a prominent icon on the home page (Figure 1).  In the secondary home page for reading activities (Figure 4) a small menu, contained in an inline frame, provided a list of titles and direct links to each essay.  The inline frame included a scroll feature and the title list was at the top of the same document as the essays, so students could locate any item by scrolling, in addition to using the links in the menu.  A smaller menu in a table below the inline frame provided links to secondary copies of the essays.  This served two purposes; some older web browsers do not display inline frames and the secondary copies were in printable RTF format if a paper copy was desired.

            Students were directed to write brief responses in text boxes and to send their responses to the instructor’s E-mail account by clicking a button bar at the bottom of the page (Figure 5).  Written assignments from the students were used to assess progress and were returned to the students with corrections through WebCT E-mail, to be used as scripts for debates in the voice boards.

Figure 4 – A reading exercise; top of the page

Figure 5 – A reading exercise; bottom of the page

The listening module

            As with the reading assignments, listening assignments was accessed directly from links in the schedule (Figure 3) or from a prominent icon on the home page (Figure 1).  Listening assignments each had a separate web page (Figure 6).  Each assignment page contained a prominent icon to start the listening script and text boxes to record responses, including notes.  Listening scripts were provided by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and were on scientific topics related to Pharmacy.  As with the reading assignments, student responses were E-mailed to the instructor by clicking a button bar (Figure 7) and written responses were used to assess student progress and returned as scripts for oral debates.   Students were encouraged to skim and scan the listening scripts and to form opinions, rather than meticulously recording all the information they heard.

Figure 6 – A listening exercise; top of the page

Figure 7 – A listening exercise; bottom of the page

The speaking module

            Unlike the listening and reading modules, the individual speaking exercises could not be accessed through the course schedule because of limitations in linking WebCT with the Wimba Voice Boards.  The “Speak” icon linked to a menu page for the Wimba Voice Boards which presented a simple and prominent icon for each exercise (Figure 8).  The Wimba Voice Boards accessed from this secondary home page had the features of a familiar web-based chat group, except that voice mail messages could be substituted for text based E-mail messages (Figure 9).  The instructor provided through recorded messages, and the students were encouraged to participate frequently.  The curriculum design directed the students to work with the listening and reading activities as preparation for capping exercises in the voice boards.

Figure 8 – The access page in WebCT for the Wimba Voice Boards

Figure 9 – A sample Wimba Voice Board

Implementation

Issues in program design

Some administrative issues beyond the control of the ELP had a significant effect on the Web-based course.  As mentioned above, the final student enrolment was reduced to three from approximately ten.  Also, the number of instructional weeks was reduced from approximately fourteen to seven.  In practice, the seven weeks represent only five weeks of effective instruction and learning; the first week was occupied with assessment and orientation exercises and in the last week participation fell off as the students prepared to travel from Japan to Canada.

The reduction in the schedule was due to the fixed end date when the students were scheduled to travel to Canada for the clinical seminars.  Administrative contingencies with the Pharmacy seminar, moved the ESL start date closer to the fixed end date. 

The learner response

The students successfully completed a number of assignments and the instructor at the U of A returned corrections and comments for improvement.  The instructor and students were able to address specific needs for improvement in English proficiency and the curriculum was adjusted to meet the changing requests from the students.  Unfortunately the brief time available for the course did not allow for an accurate assessment of proficiency gains.  Also, as mentioned above, midway through the course, the students requested a change to more informal conversation topics.  This request was accommodated, after some discussion, by bringing in conversation coaches but the change caused a small delay in the schedule.

Lessons learned

In retrospect, the technology and design features of the Web-based course performed as expected and caused no delays.  In pedagogical issues, the revision of the curriculum at midpoint caused some delays and left some of the courseware unused but this did not interfere significantly with the course objectives.  The student request for changes to the curriculum was not unusual for an ESL course, considering that the students were graduates with personal academic agendas.  The students also had no previous experience with Web-based learning and may not have appreciated the complexities involved in making ongoing changes to a Web-based course.  The experience showed that Web-based courses are generally less conducive to ongoing alterations than classroom based courses, but some flexibility could be built into a course design.  One lesson for future projects is that more consultation with typical learners during the development phase could reduce requests for ongoing revisions.

The most critical influence on the success of the course proved to be the reduced schedule.  One unfortunate consequence of this was the inability to provide an end-of -term assessment of student progress.  The students were not available at the end of the final week and the measurable language learning is difficult to assess over a brief time span.  The lesson for course design is that the task of designing Web-based courses is most often more complex than for classroom-based instruction.  The conventional level of support for classroom-based instruction is usually greater than the level of support for new modes of instruction such as web-based learning.  Extensive experience of supporting classroom-based instruction ensures that many classroom support services are transparent or taken for granted, but in contrast support for web-based learning is more visible and deliberate.  In the experience of the ELP’s coordinator, enthusiastic support for a novel mode of instruction is less substantial than the routine support provided for more conventional modes.

With a reduced need to focus on support technology and curriculum, a coordinator of classroom-based instruction can presumably give more time to other concerns.  For this project, the coordinator had to design the virtual classroom and the curriculum and then give attention to wider administrative and policy issues.  This revealed that design and development of Web-based programs requires more time and resources, and more attention to detail than equivalent classroom-based projects.  It is clear, in retrospect, that issues like scheduling and consultation with students can be squeezed out of the development process by technology and curriculum concerns.  This imbalance may not always be evident to those who initiate Web-based projects. 

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