January 2010


Issue Home >>

Blending Tertiary Level English with Educational Technology:

A Marriage in Modern Times!

by Tyrone Ali

When it comes to blended learning at The UWI, it may surprise some that the discipline of English Language has been at the forefront in the use of educational technology. Not so to the huge student population pursuing related courses over the past four years, nor to the administrators and practitioners directly involved in the planning, preparation and delivery aspects of the English Language Foundation Programme.

The most recent technique employed by the Programme has been the enormously successful video recording of summarized lectures that students download, view and interface with, seemingly anytime and anywhere!

Over the past two decades or so, the Programme was largely paper-based with weekly two-hour face-to-face sessions. Students were expected to achieve success through these sessions supplemented by the obvious need for research on their part.

The seed for transition in the Programme was planted six years ago and revolved around forward and backward linkages between the secondary and post-secondary student entering The UWI and the strategic plan of The UWI itself. Recognition and a full appreciation of the technological skills possessed by school-leavers was the catalyst.

The use of my-Elearning as an electronic platform at St Augustine has had tremendous positive impact for students who need to relate to the instructional content of the courses in a manner that reflects their learning pace. Beyond interfacing with my-Elearning to select tutorials, view time-tables, gain access to course materials, visit related websites and download and upload assignments, which can be done using any computer with Internet access (both on and off campus, 24/7), since 2007 students have been engaging Camtasia, the software that links power point presentations with audio feed as related plenary lectures are designed to incorporate this dimension that allows students to download audio recordings of lectures and so relate to the courses’ content at their own pace.

Introduced last semester, video recordings of summarized lectures have been most helpful, but not for the videos themselves, for the accessibility of the video for students to download and interface with, regardless of time or location, that has served them well in their studies.

Summarised lecture presentations lasting twenty to thirty minutes are done and then processed for web delivery. The link is then accessible to students on my-Elearning. The videos can be run on any Internet-enabled device that supports Windows Media Video. And it is this feature that students maximize as they download and utilize on their personal computers, laptops, MP3 players, MP4 players, tablet PCs and even the very popular Blackberry phones.

In order for students to really function successfully in formal English at university, backward and forward linkages with the national community cannot be ignored. The Programme has already begun an intense three-month training workshop for secondary school teachers and other officers of the Ministry of Education that focuses largely on teaching and assessment strategies using blended learning techniques. Plans are underway for a one-day secondary school staff developmental workshop that will allow English teachers to interface with the Programme’s offerings, methodologies and aims, with a view to assisting students bridge the gap between the secondary school and the university in a smoother and more holistic manner. On the other side of the coin, a proposal is being prepared for the Foundation English Programme to be part of the University’s World of Work seminars to invite firms and potential employers to outline the requirements and attributes of a model employee, with an obvious focus on the need for graduates of the University possessing formal English communicative competencies. This will undoubtedly continue to shape the Programme’s courses as the quest continues for the production of the distinctive UWI graduate capable of functioning successfully in a globalized, competitive world.

The Foundation English Programme serves four faculties of the St. Augustine campus – Humanities and Education, Social Sciences, Law, and Science and Agriculture. Additionally, there is face-to-face contact with an outreach centre in Tobago as well as outreach colleges in St. Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. There is also the relatively recent and separate Foundation Programme that caters for Evening University students reading related courses.

Blended learning offers:

• An electronic teaching-learning platform
• Power point presentations
• Electronic dissemination of lecture notes
• Online tutorials
• Exposure of students to related web links
• A Writing Centre

-Tyrone Ali is Coordinator of the English Language Foundation Programme, Department of Liberal Arts, Faculty of Humanities and Education, UWI