Having seen the value an online component can bring to learning, I was ready to delve further into emoderation. Week 2 explored some areas we are all familiar with as a face-to-face trainers:
- Motivation
- Dealing with passive learners
- Learner Needs
- Challenges
…but how might they differ in the online envirnoment?
Motivation: We boiled this down to three key areas: rapport, course content and feedback. We figured if we get it right there, we increase motivation across the board.
We did, however, talk about exceptions, such as course, like ProELT, where CPs are not all present by choice. In such scenarios we may need to work harder to provide clear links between the course and their job, and provide some immediate ‘take-homes’. An example of this would be a providing teachers with activities/ websites they could use to motivate their own learners.
Passive learners: Firstly, let’s not say all passive learning is bad, just that as language students our learners need to produce in order to advance. In the online environment there is a tag for passive learners, and it’s quite a horrible one: lurkers. Makes you think of dirty raincoats and dirtier smiles, doesn’t it? So, I’m not about to adopt that phrase, but rather summarize why it’s not appropriate for the entirety of a course and what a good emoderator will do about it:
Learner Needs: Based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, here goes a (very) basic summation of what we can do at each key stage of Maslow’s pyramid:
Challenges: If I may steal the excellent mind map of our emoderator for the course, Cristiana Osan, we can see that the online envirnoment, while full of learning possibilities, can provide many challenges for our learners.
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