 of our Center for Excellence here, as amongst you. And if you go on the website, you will see all kinds of wonderful things including all our previous seminars. So if you go and watch them, and the piracy of your own goal, hopefully you won't fall asleep when you're watching them. You can always go back. Today, it's my great pleasure, and I really say that with conviction, because one of the aims of our center is to encourage blended learning. It's one of my pleasures to introduce to you to Dr. Usla Stickler. Usla is from the Open University, where she's been for several years, getting a bit old, I need my glasses. She started off in Austria. She did her undergraduate degree in Austria. And one of my favorite subjects, philosophy. I did my degrees in philosophy and psychology too. So you can see how important philosophy has been to bring us to this new era. She then, after Austria, moved to Schaffel, where she taught German for several years, about five years, she tells me. And then she moved to the Open University, where she's a lecturer in German. And she's also the head of the virtual learning group in the Department of Languages. Some of you may already know. She has written many materials of German language teaching, language courses at all levels, from beginners to diploma courses, including various tasks, all for the virtual learning environments, and also several online tutorials. Her research interests central in the issues of independent language learning, including technology-enhanced language learning, and tandem learning, which I hope they have learned a bit more about at some point today, if not during the talk. She's currently involved in projects researching the use of virtual learning environment tools for language learning and training tutors for online language teaching. Now, for those of you who know me, I always try to bring a bit of humor and likeness to the proceedings. So as I was chatting a little bit before this, I said to her, it's gonna be something funny about you. So, I'm hoping that she will talk in a very serious manner about her topic, which is basically integrating online learning courses in distance language courses of the USLA. She'll talk for about 30, 40 minutes, and then we'll have a few, a time for a little few questions and discussion, and then we can do it more informally, just outside there. Without, again, a similar telling me, not drink any drinks in here, we can have some drinks that are outside. Thank you very much. It's a lot fun, but I'm quite relaxed about it. If you have any questions in between, please just interrupt. I've had a few ask the questions when it's really a burning issue, or if I'm confused by the new asking question, I can explain what you're going to say. If that's not a problem, would you record in similar? No, no, it is not. Not a problem, so. Integrating online learning in distance language courses, I'm going to, after a brief introduction, give you three examples of integrated courses that we've produced at OU. One of them is Cyberdeutsch at fully online course. The motif and the interactive tasks of this course are on the VLE, on the tutorial environment, and in variation, and just briefly about the course we're producing now, where the concept is also presented through the VLE. And then to mention online tutorials and parsing, and just before the time at the end, I would like to show you the software that we are using for online tutorials now, which is a little bit of a help for a little work, no technical problems, or something. I'm going to talk about the integration of online elements as well, which is the topic that the questioner asked me, how to integrate bits of online into other elements of courses, so blended approach to learning. And of course, we'll discuss hopefully problems and benefits. I've not done a few, but I'm sure I've got lots of brilliant ideas about the problems of online learning, and hopefully also about the benefits and the good points about it. Now, for those of you who don't know the Opu University, and I think that they won't be here, so I'll just repeat myself and interrupt me if I'm boring you, the Opu University is in its four-tier fee now, so we're celebrating our 40th birthday this year. It started in 1969 with distance teaching, and that was a fairly new concept to the UK at that time. It was basically the idea to open up learning for everyone at every time, every place, and regardless of their educational background. So the Opu University accepts students without A-levels, without GCSE, without prior qualifications, which has sort of offered courses. Each student can manage to study them if they can pass the exams, and they can gain a degree at the Opu University. They do not have to have qualifications before that. Now, languages were subjects that were introduced fairly late at the OU, because it was considered to be a difficult subject to teach online, because as you already know, it's not just about knowledge, delivering content to students, and they're just at the moment of learning, but languages need a lot of practice, a lot of interaction, the communications, and all different languages. And at that time, if the technology available to people in the 60s, 70s, wasn't that easy to do. But we do have successful language courses now since the 1990s. We've gradually introduced more and more technology into the courses. We've used audio conferencing since 2003. We've also seen talking over the internet with graphic elements, but not video. We've used that for tutorials and also for some big exams. And in 2007, before 2007, the Opu University introduced Moodle as its virtual learning environment. Now, these decisions that we based on student demand the students wanted to have a computer skills integrated in all the courses at the Opu University. So they wanted to show a live person exam at the OU, that they also have some computer skills. And the OU reacted by just selecting one of the virtual learning environments available at that time. And I, for one, am extremely happy that it shows an open source software, which was Moodle, which is available free for everyone who can use it, download it, change it, change the source code, update it, and then hopefully return the improved code to the wider community and to the wider community. For Moodle, there are various ways of describing it. The Moodle is called the course management system, which is a phrase I don't like, because it's not about managing courses, it's not about managing students, it's about a free way of communicating. It's also known as the learning management system, which is a little bit more user-friendly, or a virtual learning environment, which is all of the options at Moodle or the release of, they do block students, you know what your students are doing, you can guide them towards one course or the other, you can allow them entrances of the various courses and block them from other courses. But they also are platforms of communication between the students. And most importantly, it's a free web application that the kids can use to create effective online learning sites. Lots of schools download Moodle. Lots of small projects also use Moodle. And I've heard recently that also there are images that use Moodle, which I do not understand at all because they're not trying to learn or to teach something, they're trying to manage their data, which is not what Moodle does. It's not the data management system, it's not the database, it is really the virtual environment for people who want to learn and teach online. But the OU itself has taken the open-source software, added a lot of code so that it created new tools, for example, new modules as it's called in Moodle, new options for students to work and also integrated other bits into Moodle. And they've even been told if you know the project on the community to the non-community, where it's changed again and updated and integrated into other courses. Okay, now let's start with the first course, the Cyberdeutsch course. This was our first reaction to when we learned that we're going to use Moodle for all our courses. The first reaction was not the panic, but oh, let's go and play. Let's see what we can do online and what tools are available and what our students would do with all the tools there. So this is an experimental course, it was a pilot course created for students who were volunteers not doing the course as part of their regular degree, but a volunteer-involved additional course for an additional five very intensive weeks of our practicing and learning journey. The course was created by two colleagues of mine, myself. It was created very quickly over one summer. We wrote the materials, we designed all the tools, how they would fit together into the course. We then were very lucky to get some funding to have two tutors who actually taught two groups online for five weeks, but quite intensive weeks. And it was delivered fully online. There was no face-to-face contact. I've never seen any of the students perform on video, in the video conference. And even with the tutors, we only had a video contact. The occasional telephone contact was for the two students who had massive technical problems and they were touched with it and he also filmed us. But in my favor, I have to say she was 84 years old and not very computer-literate at the start of the course and she did continue right at the end of her own blogging. So it wasn't a point of problems when we had to use other tools rather than just the cybernetwork website and work space. What we tried to use for the tools, of course, the tools that were already there in the university's new version, but not all the tools were satisfactory. Moodle had at that time a blog that was just nothing like any blog that would expect to function. There was no possibility of writing comments on the blog, for example. No possibility of answering the comments. No option of uploading pictures or images or linking from there. So it was really basic. I don't know why they called it a blog. It was something completely different. And we used blogger.com at that time and we sent back to people who worked on Moodle really that we needed some functionality for the blogs and also for the book here. We used Flash Meeting, which is a software developed by the OU, by the knowledge of the Institute of TOU, who like has some languages and I have to play around with all these prior new tools and develop new software just to see what happens if we have it. And Flash Meeting was one of those tools. We got Hopefully at the OU. And it is for free for everyone to use as well because for educational purposes, you don't have to pay for it. We also used SurveyMonkey for surveys because again, the Moodle survey at that time only allowed the tutor to ask one question and the students to answer. But we wanted the students to be able to ask questions as well and as many questions as they like. Now that's the starting page of the Cyberdeutsch course. What we got basically from the OU was one workspace where we could upload as the course creators and the course authors. We could upload what we wanted on there. There's a, the central spine is given as in all. You always have one central column of information and there you can choose what you want to have in there. We chose to organize it around the calendar. So we created the course, it was structured to weeks and within the week, we had either some tasks, some materials or links outside the workspace for the students to do their work. There's always the first thing for the students with GEM, the first thing in the week is the Wochen Übersicht so that's an overview of all the tasks to do that week. And then of course in the first preparatory week we also had to introduce the tools to teach the basic computer skills, not basic, but to be able to log into the workspace already but some skills to do with particular tools that we're using. Now these are the different elements we used for the course. As I said, we wanted to use as many as possible just to get feedback from the students and also from the tutors of what is useful and we also wanted to have the different elements of how to use online tools and online teaching. So there's the use of individualized work for example in the blogs. The blog was something that the students created their own blog on blogger.com and they wrote their own stories to encourage to write about themselves, to really read about themselves and then write about their interests. The only task we did was to write in German and that was all. We could write about music, about traveling, about the house, the pets, whatever they wanted. And we set certain tasks to help us to visit other people's blogs and leave comments there. Then there was the Vicky, which was a collaborative task specifically created as something where students would write together and create one final product together. But a little bit more about that later because that was one of the things that wasn't too successful but we tried it anyway and it was created for that purpose. We had the plush meetings there, the video conference for synchronous teachings because that was for the times when the students had to be online at the same time, logging in the same plush meeting and speak in German with the students, the colleagues. We had some more autonomous words like the quizzes which we found was quite important for distance for online students because the quiz gives you immediate feedback on how we're doing and if the students liked it because it didn't feel like somebody is observing them and judging them. It was just the computer telling them 80 out of 100 or try again or whatever it said as a response. And it's very quick so you don't have to wait for your students to be online or for an email to be answered. The forum, we used the forums on Google for asynchronous discussion. So it was similar to the plush meetings, similar to a tutorial where you discuss a certain issue but it's a simple, so whenever you want to log in, you respond to somebody else's post in the forum or you're opening a thread and they can ask you any questions and discuss things on the forum. Overall, the website was a sort of anonymous in the newcomers, anonymous log in with students sometimes daily logged in to see if something happened. And I say anonymous, we were to commerce because of course we really tracks all the students log in. So you could, after the course, you could check how a student had logged in and even down to details of what they looked at on the website. We can't check how long they stay on there or whether they just logged in with the way 20 cup of coffee came back out on our local computer. We don't know that but we know how the students actually checked into the website and whether they looked for a mobile key or not. Yes, this was the first online attempt at the course and we didn't know how to give the materials or not our students were. We decided to introduce the tools gradually. It's a little bit of a task with the five weeks to get in so many tools but we thought if we start with one with eight different tools, we'll just give up there and then we can say I have no journey of computing. But actually we started quite a simple with the calendar so they had to go to the website, find out what the tasks were and then they had worksheets there which were written in order so they could just download them and improve them off what they wanted to. And the forum which was at the beginning of the first week of first contact with other students. So please stick with me at the end before you check the papers. And then we gradually introduced more and more different tools. In the end, we had to serve with people feedback which is one of the forms on duty where you can send comments on those like those creators that creates this form, flash meetings, the web searches to do and of course the worksheets and the capital. This is just a screenshot of the flash meeting but for those of you who are visiting it is not to try it out you can go to the Open University website and you find a link there to Open Learn for order for free stuff of the Open University. It is stored and flash meeting is one of the for free tools for educational use. You can just book a meeting. Flash meeting was created not specifically with teaching in mind but certainly not with teaching languages in mind. So while we were negotiating what to use and discussions with KMI with the Knowledge Media Institute created this tool and we asked them for certain features we asked them to change certain things around and they reacted very quickly and did some of the things but still it looks very much like a meeting tool it looks like other, I don't know tools used for business meetings for example. It has one feature that only allows one speaker at a time so you can't do this natural interrupting or talking across one another but you can do it in a face-to-face language class for example. They gave us some very interesting technical reasons for that I'm sure it's all true it wouldn't worry if everybody talked at the same time but it's not like a natural language class really. The video slot, you've got multiple videos so up to 50 people at home time can log in you wouldn't see lots of images then you would just see a really fun mail of people's video cameras but you can change that view to having only the names of participants there. We always get one big video image if somebody speaks, the image is broadcast and the quality of that is quite good enough that you can see their lips moving and see that they're speaking at the time. You can also look at this, what was that? You can see the screenshot you've got a hand-raising button where you can actually queue up as the next speaker and it's very important for tutors is people to interrupt the button. Now, the knowledge media has told us that we were, when we looked at the use of different buttons we in languages were the ones who used the interrupt button most. I mean it's not surprising, the way we teach and we just say, I want to speak now you just interrupt people, rudely. There's other features such as text chat and voting and smiling, such an unusual thing but I think most importantly there's a focus on the speaker and on speaking. There is a vibe for the open new window and it wasn't created with that in mind so it's a bit different to other teaching tools that we use and it's a bit different and I'll try to show you later. Lessons learned, I think that was the whole purpose of doing this course and creating the course apart from having fun was wanted to know what we can do in our real courses and what we cannot do. It was deliberately designed to combine to throw everything at students and combine as many tools as possible and that was one of the feedbacks we got from most users. Ooh, there's a lot to do. There was a lot to take in of tools and the language and all the websites and all the tasks we asked them to do. It was just a mess. One of the things we learned is it's important to integrate the tools. Don't just give them all those different modules as it is presented in movie, for example, and one option so there's a forum and there's a big key and if you want to work on the blog, if you want to go away and do a chat, that synchronous chat. If you write a task, try and combine tools so do a discussion in the forum first then you write up the results in a big key, for example, or have an online synchronous chat or in writing and then summarize what you've learned in the forum and then start a discussion or integrate some links. So integrate the tools and integrate the tasks as well. It makes a lot more sense to the students. The work for some issues with the tools, some technical issues because they were from different sources. They were not, they could look very uniform. So for some students it was very confusing to go to blogger.com and have to use a different password and then go back to mobile and use a different password again and flash meeting was linked from another part of the university where besides, it's a little bit confusing. We try to change the number of our courses and try to link everything from the central workspace which helps a little bit, but I don't know. It's solved all the problems. There's also some perceptual problems because we introduced so many new tools and even for our teachers it wasn't always quite clear what's the difference between the forum and the blog. Why am I using a Viki now for this task and not my blog? And this, as I get a lot of teaching to do before it can even start working in the language, just telling them how to use the different tools and encouraging the teachers also to move students towards certain tools for certain tasks. The forum is ideal for discussions. It's not ideal if you want to write your life history and what your pet looks like. It's almost everybody else to tears in the forum if you write anything longer than, let's say, 150 words in the forum message. But if you want to do that, open the blog, everybody will be happy to see images of your little couplers or whatever you can for them and just look in and leave a comment. It's a better tool for that use than for them. And also Vikis are supposed to be collaborative learning. So if you are typically an English student and you're too shy to correct anybody else's mistake and just write a little comment there, I think actually that Austria is in the center of Europe and not in Southern Europe. So you wouldn't do that in a Viki. Just go in correct and change whatever mistake there is. Not if there's, again, a lot of learning to do for the students and for the teachers as well. If you need to deal differently with different tools. One of the positive things was the combination of collaborative and independent work. And lots of students commented on that. That they could pick how they felt about working or that they felt going into a forum and chatting with other students or whether they wanted to do something on their own and focus on the grammar and so on. So having this choice, this whole palette of the picking tools from I think can be quite complicated for some students. But as I said, there are issues with collaboration and group work. Our students, particularly because they're at a distance university, they're used to working on their own. They work on their own, the same thing that they work to get to send feedback to individual students. The only time that they ever meet is in tutorials and even though they don't have to do group work and even though they don't have to attend all our tutorials are voluntary. So our students can get through the whole course until the very final exam without ever meeting anyone. And now expecting them, suddenly because they're working online and because they can do it, suddenly to collaborate and be a group just didn't work. You have to do something to make them into a group, to form a group, to give them some incentive why they should do collaboration rather than everybody do their little bits and work on their own. And there's also there's a difference between collaboration and cooperation. It's possible to give them the task so structurally that they say somebody has to do page one to five in the book and the next one has to do five to 10 but that is not collaboration. That's distribution of work and everybody does a little bit in the end to come together and make a puzzle out of this. But what we want to encourage is at least students working together and by creating knowledge together, by discussing, by asking questions, by giving feedback to each other and sort of creating a little bit that's more than the sum of its individual parts. The combination of asynchronous work is also something that's typically for distance teaching anyway and it works very well on online because our students are used to that. They know that they have to discipline to actually go within that week to go on the website and check their house and check what they have to do. And they also have to discipline to meet online because one time they will feel they have to be online then they will be, maybe 10 minutes late but they will be there. With other important lessons learned like we're still working, that is the training of teachers of course and the training of students for the online work. Now let me move on to a real course and that is actually already in existence and has started in February 2009. It's called Motiva and it's an upper-intermediate journal course. We redesigned the course, the original course started I think in 1998 and it was based on books and videos of that time still and I think CDs, but it didn't have any online on and on when it started. It's a 60 point course runs for nine months from February to October and at the moment this version of the course has five books, three DVDs, additional print materials like assessment guides or computing guides and the spine of the course is actually online. The spine of the structure for the course is online. So again it's got the Motiva website the typical column in the middle for the whole calendar is and it's got news form on one side and resources, there's a lot of resources that are available in print but also it's downloaded with PDFs online and there's additional resources under the section column where you can have the order, the additional tools and tasks that students do over the whole course. But in the middle there's the study planner or the calendar against such a few weeks and within the week the tasks, the individual tasks that students have to do and a new feature that we've introduced now is this little tick on the right hand side. Very nice for students once they've finished the task they've done enough work on let's say the survey about how good the websites are then they can tick it off and it will appear on multiple memorize that it will appear when it's logged in. We've done this task pick a move on the next one. So that's just a graphic representation of the elements of Motiva. You've got the central, in the center of the study guide that organizes students. In this course that's still written in English so that's such a easy entry point for students and it also explains what the different elements are. So this is the sort of the, but you cannot close because this is, if students are frightened going to the computer first of all there's a post to start on the website with the frightened is still half of a piece of paper that you can hold on to and read through or there's a post to do forms to get online. There's a little bit of a pathway house. It's not yet everything online and it might never be, but not be because of our team there as well. For the first students they're not, you're typically 18 to 22 year old. They're not majoring computer literate. Actually the oldest graduate from the opening years she was 94 years old. But it's by far the best student we have. I had my beginnings German course. I had a 104 year experience. But they're still studying. They might have finished all the degrees but they're still studying. And for them it's important to have this traditional way into a course just something to hold on to, something to read through and somebody to help them to log on, to get online and start their studies like that. There's still the print elements so there's four books and there's a study guide, five books all together. There's the DVDs with interactive tasks on them but they're offline, they're not online elements. There's also set films. Can I speak up? Okay. There's also a set film for the students to watch. And very importantly there's the personal tutor. They put one tutor allocated to them, they can ask the tutor all sorts of questions and they can work out for other questions and problems they might have. There's a big OU community, there's other students and there's also the study help you can get for general study questions and there's a technical help, there's availability for 25 hours a day. And they've got their fees in the tutor group, they can meet them online. Let's keep that because it just explains in writing what I showed you on the graphic. So the students have this imprint for what they know what to do, they can do all the book tasks, they can do offline, they can do the DVD room tasks, they have to have a computer for that or have to have views of the computer for that but they don't have to be online and then they've got lots of online tasks as well. There's just one example of a task on the online task, it's a forum task for the students fairly early in 10 or 1 that's in the first month of the course. It asks them to do some internet research first, it gives a description of what the task is, it also gives a description of learning outcomes why am I doing that, because I want to learn what to do, what is it like. It gives off some links to websites where you can start the internet search and then the forum instructions where they go into the forum and discuss what the students were doing. It's also this task specifically uses a preparation for assessment. So this task is integrated into multiple ways, it integrates the print materials for the topic that's chosen, there's some recovery preparation in the print materials and the books for this. It integrates with the group by asking them to go to the forum and discuss what the key is in the forum. It integrates the tools, the web search, the print materials and also the forum and it's integrated into the whole course structure by the assessment because we have to do some preparation to do the assignment successfully. And that's now done, so we'll see before this. Illuminate our new software for teaching online for our learning tutorial and it's again a nice toy I like to play around with it's a commercial software, it's not like Moogle if you can just go and get it, you actually have to pay for this and about from there the time which is available of course. But it is commercial software, but it is created for online teaching and it's fully integrated into the Moogle really. So students log into their website and to the course website and there is a link to the tutorials. You don't have to go anywhere else. The materials for the tutorials are prepared by the course team. So we create some of the materials and as you can see from this screenshot, the focus is actually on the content, not so much on the speaker, so there's a list of people who are speaking on the left-hand side, it's just me logged in at the moment. There's the speaking button at the bottom there so it's not that important. The focus is definitely on this right board, on the screen here where you can either have images or just text, or you can have drag and drop with these interactive tasks if you want to. This for example is drag and drop where we order the sentences in the right into the left-hand side. It's got a lot of additional functions which I want you to mention and we don't use all of them, but it's got one where you can take students on the web to where you can take them to different websites which makes it a little update in your materials. You can take them to today's news in the newspaper website. Okay, editing the site might look like a pain to some of you, but actually I find it makes the courses so much more flexible, it makes it possible for the course team, the course members to write new entries, to add the section, add resources, add links if something happens in the news column or even within the course materials. If you write in advance, you can hide some of the resources from students and reveal them later as they go through the course. It's also got a news form where it can alert students to any mistakes in the materials, for example, don't have to send out a stop-press messages anymore until they're made on page 55. There's a typo which is added to the news form. And some of my colleagues have used the forms for meet the author form, where in one week during the course, she asked the author of the chat for the students what she's dealing with to join in the forum, join in the debate and ask the students to ask questions. If you had any questions about these weeks' topics, they could ask directly the author for some responses. The students love that, because they had the feeling that they could react to the course materials and not know anything about it. Because that's the first two months of student usage on the website, on the Motiva course website. As you can see, February, 83.7% of students blocked in on the user website in March, 85%. And it just means that those who have tried it once can see the benefit of it and probably are going back again. The author did not just visit once to visit 19.7% almost 20 times every month. It's quite a lot of online work. Okay, then very quickly, the last example I wanted to give you, that's Variationen, our course in Advanced German. I can only talk a little bit about that because we're just writing it, so there is no final product for that here. Just a few websites, a few tasks that we've written, but no books as yet in the same territory. It will be a 60-body course starting February 20, three books, a study by one laser person, a cultural reader, and one others who work with the students, a set of things, but no DVD roles. You're going to put all the AV materials online and the activities to do with AV materials as well. The spine of the structure, because again, I'm going to be online and also with interactive tasks as with Motiva. But the big difference here is, to show you that that's the course website as it looks at the moment. This is just used by the course team to exchange ideas to upload tasks that you might want to use later in the course. So this is the playground before the actual course. But I wanted to show you the big difference between the Motiva course and this course is that there's content presented online, there's content on the web, which has advantages and disadvantages You have to consider visibility, you have to consider that students actually read or might be reading from a screen. Some students don't like that, so that is the option of printing it off. There's a printable version. The same text can be printed off as PDF files and looks the same through the video. Still, it's easier to navigate on here and it's also searchable, so it's not going to be searchable as it is online. Okay, let's get to the integrating online elements now. Only fully online courses have only online elements so there will be some courses that will be used online elements only for interaction, for example, or for online communication. Interaction can be with a computer, with a machine, as well as with other people, communication normally with people. It can be used for online tutorials only, so that if the students have print materials or DVDs and only go online for tutorials. Or it can be used for online assessment, which is a little bit of a tricky issue anyway. Or simply online updating. Our courses are normally written for 10 years, so they should be in the English class for 10 years in lots of subjects and even languages so you can't have an up-to-date course for 10 years. It just gets a little bit old, it's still talking about the football in 2008 or something. And there's online content as well, so you can add some content. And there's other elements that you have to integrate with the course. You can have print materials, for example, combined with online communication, online tutorials, and the AV materials that you still have to use offline, the same with the students, maybe the wrongest, for example, or you go down the road and say, only for those students who are not confident you can do the uses, you can give them the how-to guides with print, but from then on, you have to go online. You can have these to-case tutorials, of course. Or you can say just one instance that we need to see where you show them how this course works. You sit in line at the computer, make sure everybody knows how to log in and how to use it, and then on everything is online. So it's, do you have to integrate that? And this is a particularly confusing graphic, and I think that's what most of our students felt as well in the first sort of cyber-roach course. There's a lovely little mailbox there. Let's just start here, or there's something that looks interesting, let's go and try that out. I think it is really important to make sure that you integrate this course design as you integrate the different tools of the task and present this also as one complete course, as one complete course for the students and make sure that whatever elements you choose, put stupid ones, printed guides, even materials, all that it sounds, that the students know where to go when and what to do on which medium. Okay, challenging. I think I need you to come up with the challenges and I'll just stop talking here. Challenges and benefits, if you've got positive points to say as well, if you appreciate it, but there's lots of challenges and problems in other words. It's really a wonderful example, I think from all the premium places in the world for distance learning, blended learning. I just even going through...