Online pre-sessional courses for university

As was the case with most teaching in 2020, the UK university summer EAP pre-sessional courses (which are designed to prepare international students for English-medium academic study) had to go fully online, because of the Covid-19 lockdown. Here are the reflections of two teachers, Nergiz Kern and Zoe Smith, who taught on different courses, with a focus on challenges encountered (together with possible solutions) and opportunities perceived.

Challenges

1 Short lessons

Lesson lengths were about half those of normal face-to-face courses, but we had to get through a similar amount of content. This meant complex concepts needed to be explained more clearly and succinctly than ever.

Solutions

Both Zoe’s and Nergiz’s courses were based on the flipped learning approach, which meant that the learners first worked through material and answers by themselves. Class time was used to review and practise key skills taught in the material and to clarify student questions.

The learning materials were supplied by Zoe’s university as PowerPoint slides, adapted from a coursebook. Creating such slides provides good training in being selective with information (because too much text on a slide can look dull, as well as being a strain to read). To support communication and emphasise key points, pen tools for underlining, circling and drawing arrows on the slide text were useful here.

Nergiz’s students completed assignments based on a coursebook. Nergiz and her colleagues then created and provided extra collaborative writing and speaking tasks and review quizzes for their live online classes.

2 Missing visual cues

Many students tend not to say when they don’t understand something, and, without always being able to see their faces – using webcams sometimes caused the students’ internet connections to drop out – we didn’t always have the visual cues of them looking confused (or inattentive).

Solution

One way to avoid the throw-away Do you understand? question is to use an online learning platform’s polling tools to create mini ‘quizzes’ around taught points. Such quizzes can provide a quick and lively snapshot of what the students are struggling with.

3 Problems with classroom management

Multiple issues can arise in online live sessions:

• Managing the technology and the students (how everyone moves between breakout rooms and the main room, monitoring breakout rooms efficiently, keeping an eye on chat, sharing screens, switching cameras and microphones on and off when needed, looking at different windows and documents, etc) can be a challenge.
• Some students might respond faster (raising their hands, unmuting themselves, contributing orally), which can lead to unequal opportunities for participation.

Classroom management online is, therefore, very important, but very different from that in the physical classroom.

Solutions

Solutions will partly depend on the learning platform used, but here are some universally applicable suggestions:

• Train both students and teachers in the use of the technology for things they need to be able to do and in the rules for interacting (eg when – and when not – to press the buttons), and establish classroom routines.
• Provide opportunities for different types of interaction in a live session, so that tech-challenged students or those with a lower language ability have a chance to participate. For example, everyone has to type their answers into the text chatbox first.
• Provide very clear instructions, both written and oral.
• Use multiple monitors. Displaying keys, transcripts and teaching notes on a separate screen from that used for the live lesson view makes delivery more seamless.

4 Reduced social interaction

Perhaps due to the necessarily rushed development time for the online courses, or because of lack of ideas or because it wasn’t considered a priority, both Nergiz’s and Zoe’s courses omitted social programmes and local area immersion elements. In Nergiz’s course, the students were all automatically enrolled in a ‘Conversation Club’, but her students were either not aware of it or did not participate in it because of the intensity of the course.

The students also missed the acculturation aspects which are ordinarily a part of pre-sessional courses in the UK (opening bank accounts, using public transport, shopping, etc).

A colourful, customisable scene awaits as you enter a Mozilla Hubs lobby

Solutions

The first and final minutes of the live sessions should be used to create rapport with the students and add a social element. Nergiz showed photographs and talked about these briefly (eg fruits she picked in the garden, to talk about what she did last weekend). Then she invited her students to do the same in another lesson. Alternatively, she asked the students what the weather was like, and they all answered in text chat. One or two students were then invited to elaborate, using their microphones. Here are some other suggestions:

• Invite all the students on the course to a closed online group, so they can get to know each other and chat casually.
• Match up local students with those on the pre-sessional course, to act as ‘chat partners’.
• Zoe’s course used Mozilla Hubs (hubs.mozilla.com) as an informal teacher meet-up space, which could have worked similarly well for student socialising. Mozilla Hubs has the feel of Second Life, and can be accessed through a regular screen or a VR (virtual reality) headset. Nergiz used to teach in Second Life (see her article ‘Starting a Second Life’ in ETp Issue 61) and believes 3D virtual worlds can add a social sense of presence to online courses, provided they are universally accessible and intuitive to learn.
• For local ‘visits’, Google Expeditions has a lot of free VR and non-VR tours of various places around the world, or new ones could be created using Google Tour Creator. Some universities already offer virtual tours of their campuses or their cities. You can see an example for Liverpool University at www.liverpool.ac.uk/virtual-tour/campus/student-life. A virtual library tour should also be imperative, as part of the persuasive armoury of reasons why the Google search engine should not be used as the sole research tool once the students embark on their degree courses.

Opportunities

1 Blended learning

Both Zoe and Nergiz felt that their students engaged more with the course material online than they did in face-to-face classes. The flipped format helped increase student talking time in the live sessions, as more time was shifted from presentation to practice, which, as Randy Garrison and Heather Kanuka report, can lead to more effective learning and retention. A blended approach avoids the necessity of having to teach in lock-step fashion, as each student can take the time they need to work through the material. Having to work through assignments and prepare before class also shifts more responsibility onto the learners, training them in becoming more autonomous, which is important at university. The students were generally more engaged in the live sessions too, because they were prepared and had to do tasks, rather than just listen.

2 Enhanced listening skills

The online mode, with voices heavily distorted through microphones, means that students need to have particularly good English listening skills. This is problematic for the majority Chinese student contingent in the UK, who often perform weakly in English listening exams. However, being forced to listen more carefully creates an opportunity for the students to improve their listening skills.

3 Recordings

Both the platforms that Zoe and Nergiz used (Blackboard Collaborate and Microsoft Teams, respectively) provide the option to record live sessions. Recordings can be positively exploited for both teaching and learning purposes. The students can watch them again to practise their listening skills or revisit something important that was missed because of connectivity problems during the lesson or genuine fatigue (Zoe had students spanning time zones from Chile to China).

Teachers can extract student language to use in a feedback session or to decide what to focus on in another lesson. Recordings also make self- and peer-observation for teacher development purposes possible and easier.

4 Learning transferable workplace skills

Working with remote teams using online asynchronous and synchronous communication and virtual meeting tools, learning the rules of interaction in virtual meetings, and writing appropriate text messages and emails are crucial workplace skills, which the students learnt as a bonus in their online courses.

Zoe found that with the short live lesson times, she received more student emails than usual. And because the students were initiating and responding to emails more frequently, it led to considerably improved email composition.

5 Relaxing assessment

On Zoe’s course, the students were given access to test papers at a set time for a given time frame, and completed the tests unmonitored. Gone were the strict security arrangements. This year’s method seemed in many ways fairer, as, in real life, when people are approaching new tasks, they can often refer to another source. Of course, there is a risk of the students cheating, but most teachers have spent enough time with their students to know when a piece of writing seems too good to be true, and can utilise plagiarism-checking software, if necessary.

Overall, we both believe there is a place for online and, particularly, blended pre-sessional courses, not just during emergencies, and that, given sufficient development time, these courses can make learning and teaching more efficient, effective and sustainable.