Tag Archives: Southampton

Preparations underway for 25th EuroCALL conference to be held at Southampton

24/02/2017

EuroCALLPreparations are now in full swing for the 25th EuroCALL conference, to be hosted by Modern Languages at the University of Southampton from 23-26 August 2017. We look forward to sharing knowledge and experience about the use of technology in language learning and teaching with colleagues worldwide, participating in inspiring debate and making new friends.

EuroCALL is the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning and it has been supporting and developing research and good practice in the use of technology for language teaching and learning for over 25 years. You can follow us here at Southampton in the run-up to the conference on the EuroCALL 2017 website and on Twitter @EurocallLang.

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Promoting German language and culture online: the SoGerman blog

11/05/2016

SoGerman banner

This month’s blog post is from Patrick Stevenson, Professor of German and Linguistic Studies and Head of German in the Department of Modern Languages, and introduces a new blog that has been set up to support and promote German language learning.

The decline in the study of modern foreign languages over the last 10 years or so has affected German particularly severely. One of the initiatives that have been developed to address this is the Think German campaign coordinated by the German Embassy in London. The main aim of this campaign is to generate a greater awareness of, and interest in, German life and culture through the concerted efforts of regional consortia of university German departments. Each group acts as a hub within the national network in the hope that with the limited resources at their disposal they can reach a large audience of potential German students.

Modern Languages at Southampton is developing its contribution to Think German in the form of a blog – SoGerman – that is a joint effort between academic staff and students and is aimed primarily at 6th Form students and their teachers. The blog is intended not so much as a pedagogical resource as a source of information and inspiration, with topics ranging from ‘childhood heroes’ (characters from stories and TV programmes that German children grow up with) through popular culture (e.g. German comedians and music from the 80s to the present) to portraits of German cities and notes on milestones in German history.

It’s still very much a work in progress – many of the categories have yet to be populated – but we decided to let it go live now so that we could get feedback and suggestions for the next stages of development. We are eager to encourage contributions from school/college and university students, so that the blog can build up a community of users. We are also on Facebook and Twitter and on Instagram, so we hope that through these various means we can raise the profile of SoGerman and begin to develop an active following.

The German Section of Modern Languages at Southampton is planning to organise a German cultural festival in October, which will include amongst other things the official launch of the SoGerman project. So: watch this space!

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A research study investigating the student experience on the MA in English Language Teaching: Online

03/03/2016

MA in ELT: Online

This month’s blog post is from Andrew Davey, eLanguages Projects Officer and Specialist Technician in eLearning, and Charlotte Everitt, Teaching Fellow in eLearning, in the Department of Modern Languages, and reflects on a research study looking at student experience on the MA in English Language Teaching: Online.

Context for the study

The University of Southampton MA in English Language Teaching: Online is a 2.5 year part-time Masters programme, which has been run in collaboration with the British Council since 2007. Over 100 students have successfully completed the course and over 90 are currently studying, based in over 25 different countries.

As the programme continues to grow in scale and global reach, the need to develop effective procedures for refreshing, enhancing and supplementing its content and reviewing its design features becomes greater. Ensuring that new developments are grounded in an understanding of the student experience is critical to this process.

Identifying the need for further research

Our most recent round of refreshment saw content and readings updated across four modules of the Online MA. This process included increasing the availability and variety of reading sources, introducing pair and group discussion tasks, adding new audio/video content and replacing old Flash activities with more compatible HTML5 activities.

The process drew on findings from both module feedback and observations of how students and tutors were using the course. However, it also highlighted the need for further research on the student experience to act as a basis for future developments.

The research study

A combination of qualitative and quantitative data related to different aspects of the student experience were collected via a short online survey distributed to current Online MA students. 30 responses were received.

Aspects of the course receiving excellent feedback included:
• student enjoyment of the course (rated 4.5 out of 5)
• quality of course documentation (4.5/5)
• ease-of-use and accessibility (4.4/5)
• task design (4.3/5)

Students also commented positively on the relevance of the content to their learning needs, the selection of reading materials and the quality of tutoring and tutor support.

In terms of improvements, students said that they wanted to see more video and audio resources, improved accessibility and availability of reading materials, and better integration of online tools to enhance interactivity. Additionally, fewer than half of the students had completed the induction materials. A further finding was that although the majority of students felt part of an online community, fewer felt like part of the University of Southampton community.

The next steps

This process of refreshment and subsequent research has provided a useful basis for developments on the Online MA, including a new round of refreshment of the Year 1 modules. We have introduced a BigBlueButton virtual classroom to the platform alongside the existing Moodle communication channels. Further ongoing developments include the creation of a bank of lecture recordings for access by students, and the integration of these recordings into core content. We are also exploring ways to enhance and highlight the induction resources, and to identify ways to help students feel more integrated into the University of Southampton community.

The findings from this project were presented at the 2016 LLAS eLearning Symposium. More information about the MA in ELT: Online can be found on the course website.

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A case study exploring the evolution of one online course design

14/09/2015

Get Ready for Southampton

This month’s blogpost is by Julie Watson, Head of eLearning in the Department of Modern Languages:

Since 2011, all incoming University of Southampton international students have been offered a free online course to help them prepare for university life and study before their arrival. The course called ‘Get Ready for Southampton’ (GRfS) has its roots in a tutored online preparatory course taken annually between 2005 and 2010 by up to 200 international students before going onto a pre-sessional course in EAP. As that course grew, so its learning design changed and in its new ‘skin’, GRfS now draws between 2000 and 2500 participants each time it is run. Pre-sessional students have been joined on the course by direct entry international students, Erasmus exchange students, visiting scholars as well as next year’s wannabe students of Southampton.

A recent study has focused on exploring how the course has evolved over the past ten years and the part that international students themselves have played as agents of change in this process. The role of students in influencing educational change has received particular interest in recent years (see e.g. JISC Change Agents Network, 2010) and studies have been undertaken elsewhere in areas such as listening to student feedback about institutional implementation of learning technologies, involving students as partners in course design, using learner-generated content. Given the length of time that our online course has run, I wanted to take a long view on course evolution and examine the role of student agency as well as the impact of parallel developments in educational and Web. 2.0 technologies.

The results have been interesting and have shown student impact across the course. A notable shift has taken place from small tutor-directed groups to a much larger open and fluid format, which allows students to have much greater influence in the direction of the course and, in this sense, also generate content. The teacher’s role has shifted as the phenomenon of MOOCs is also showing. The growth in the role played by the social aspect of the course together with the Web 2.0 proliferation of social networking tools and technologies has led to students making the choices of course tools and organising use amongst themselves – especially in the multicultural context of participants. The provided content of this course has also undergone significant change since making podcasts for education (see e.g. Salmon, 2009) marked a move away from purely text-based content at least seven or eight years ago. In many cases, including our own open content has eased the path of course design in recent years.

The study was presented at ALT-C this year and will be written up for publication in the proceedings. More information about the online course is available from the Get Ready for Southampton page on the eLanguages website.

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