 Welcome back to Domains 21 and we are here today with Elaine Polker from the Open University, who will be talking with us about moving your language teaching online and open resource for sharing good practice. Elaine, welcome to the Domains 21 track. Thank you, Jim. So, hello everyone. Thank you for listening to this talk. So, I'm Elaine Polker. I am a senior lecturer in French in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the Open University and also open educator, open researcher. And I'm here today to give you a little talk about a toolkit that we have recently developed to support teachers to move their language teaching online. So, the presentation will cover different aspects. I will try to answer certain questions. So, hopefully we will clarify how the toolkit came about and how it was developed, what it contains and who it is for. I'm going to show you a little bit of data that we have collected so far about its usage. And I want to talk at the end about how the toolkit encouraged open practices in the teaching of modern languages. And at the end of this presentation, I have also added further resources that you might find useful, essentially resources developed by the Open University. So, now a bit of background to the toolkit. So, as we all know, a year ago, we all went into lockdown. March 2020, all the teachers in the world had to pilot to online teaching. And during the first lockdown, the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, at the old you were approached by a wide range of colleagues and friends in the UK and much beyond for tips and recommendations for teaching online. So, a group of us, as you can see us here, thought, well, we've got something, we've got to do something about this. And we pulled together all the, you know, the principles and the experience and the expertise that we have acquired in the last 20 years or so of teaching languages online. And we designed a toolkit. So, the toolkit is essentially a set of principles and guidance for language teachers in the sector of higher education and for anyone in the world. So, what we're trying to do is to provide practical advice about how teachers can create an interactive online environment for their students and to support learning online. So, the toolkit contains nine different help sheets, if you like, nine pieces of advice. And of course, it's an open resource, so it can be adapted, it can be repurposed, it can be translated, it can be shared by anyone in the world. Because we're totally aware that this toolkit is based on experience at the Open University, which is a completely distance education institution. And so, we are absolutely aware that many universities will be in different setup. And so, some of the principles, some of the approaches that we recommend in this toolkit might be adaptable, might not be, but anyone can do anything they like with a kit. So, what does it contain? We have decided to limit it to nine sections. It could have been a lot bigger than that, but we thought as an emergency, what are the main challenges that teachers are going to be faced. So, the first one is how to create a classroom online. Then we move to how to create an online community. So, we talk about encouraging students to build, learn a community. Number three is developing your teaching on a voice online, which is something that is particularly specific to online teaching, something that teachers may not have to do necessarily when they teach face to face. The teaching before language skills online is something that is specific again to language teaching. So, we cover how to do listening, speaking, reading and writing. Another important aspect is how to facilitate a synchronous language tutorial online for most people, for most teachers that would have been the first, you know, the pandemic would have been their first time that they have to do a class live online. An important aspect to online is maintaining motivation. So, we give quite a lot of tips and recommendations about that. Number seven is developing assessment strategies. So, we thought perhaps teachers would need to have ideas on how to assess online, assess languages online. Using a learning management system is obviously an important point, excuse me, and then reflecting on the blend that is best for your learners. So, what we did, so we launched the toolkit in October, not 21, time flies, and I have got the link to the toolkit here. So, we launched the toolkit in collaboration with our partner, the University Council for Modern Languages in the UK, and we also delivered a few workshops for individual institutions following the launch. So, we were approached by, for example, the University of Loveborough Language Centre and University of Granada. We also did some presentations at the Global Open Research Network seminar and a few presentations internally at, for example, teaching enhancement seminars. And we launched also the toolkit through Twitter. We've had quite a few responses through that campaign. Right, so 185 participants at the two launch events from 36 UK universities and seven universities in four other European countries. And we asked teachers to tell us about the experience of online teaching they had so far and only 10% declared that they had taught online before the start of the pandemic. 28% said that they received some form of training for online teaching and among the participants, 66% were teaching online completely and 28% at the time had some sort of blended teaching so they had a little bit of face-to-face. And 88% planned to use the toolkit after the launch event. During the, again, at the start of the launch, we asked teachers how they felt about online teaching and this is what came up. So the big two feelings, if you like, that came through was frustration and challenging. But it was quite reassuring to see that they felt that it was enjoyable and interesting and flexible and also creative and hopeful. So despite the fact that a few said that it was tiring and it was exhausting, they were mixed feelings but through the conversation it transpired that there was a lot of hope. Okay, so to date, the toolkit has been visited 4,009 times and the most popular help sheets are, well, the most popular help sheet is the Creating an Online Classroom, which is not surprising that we decided to put that as number one because in our experience, this is the most challenging aspect of online teaching, making sure that students feel secure and confident and comfortable in their new environment. After that is the teaching of the language skills that is important for language teachers. So help sheet four comes second and then maintaining motivation. So these are the three that are the most read, the most downloaded and then developing teaching voice, creating an online community, facilitating a tutorial, developing assessment strategy and not surprisingly using a learning management system at the coming last because as we were talking to teachers, they said that it's not really important to them and certainly not in their power to create or manage a learning management system. So just a few quotes here, three nice quotes that came up during the launch events. One said, one of the main challenges I found when teaching online is the lack of social contact among students. I found the section Creating an Online Community particularly helpful. Then it is a very useful tool to everyone that has never taught online before. It gives good explanation on how to approach online teaching and also provides with very good advice to solve common problems in that context. Thank you very much for creating this toolkit and for the launch events in October. I found it really helpful and I received lots of tips in a stressful moment. So this was nice to hear but also reassuring that teachers found the kit helpful and that they could actually see something that was of use to them in their particular context. So now I'd like to talk a little bit more about whether the toolkit fostered open practices. So it's a very recent resource and we haven't got a lot of data and we haven't analysed the data that we've got in depth. But we can certainly make some preliminary conclusions and I'd like to share that with you now. So the Times Higher Education Campus Digital Teaching Survey report revealed that 36% of the respondents had no experience of online teaching and for those who had a reasonable amount of experience or a lot of experience of online teaching prior to the pandemic, this was often asynchronous only. And that's what I was saying earlier. The teachers we talked to during the launch for most of them said that they had never done a live tutorial before. They may have used email, forums, asynchronous tools but they never taught with Zoom before. The analysis of the chat discussions show that actually whether you teach face to face or online you have absolutely profound beliefs about the way you want or you think it's best to teach languages. So for example some novice teachers were asking what to do when students do not prepare the work in advance. They said, you know, how on earth can you conduct a tutorial if they don't look at the vocabulary that we set or whatever. So there were also conversations about the use of camera and the use of the chat and this is also a very important aspect of language teaching. It's about communication. It's about interaction. So they were quite frustrated by the fact that students were very reluctant to put the camera and something else that came up about beliefs about teaching. They were wondering if they had to correct all the grammar mistakes that were in the chat, for example. So these conversations were extremely revealing because they really pointed to a particular aspect of language teaching which is true whether you are face to face or online. What was reassuring was that there were some signs of readiness to embrace the new teaching environment and a fairly open mind about it. Some challenges were raised and there are similarities in the challenges that we came across. It came across like 20 years ago when we started to teach online at the OU, but there were some slight variations. So in terms of challenges, some noted that they had to, they say, animate the class more. What they mean, of course, is that the tutor becomes more of a facilitator online and have to encourage students to participate more than in a traditional classroom. They also noticed that the preparation is crucial. That was nice to hear. They mentioned what they called pre-tutorial tasks and flipped classrooms. Naturally, without having much training, teachers realised that this is particularly important online but also a challenge because most of these people are part-time and they don't have enough time and so the heavy preparation is an issue. Also, they realised that online teaching exacerbates disparities between students and also show mixed abilities in the language a lot more than in face to face. They also said that the balance between activities in plenary and in breakout rooms is super important. I think that what transpired also is that the teachers are much, much more inclined to share good practice since the pandemic and there was some teachers who provided links to resources and they shared tools that they have been using successfully, for example, Padlet. There were also conversations about the use of proctoring software, for example. In the case of one department, they said that they were going to create a platform for sharing their own resources and have regular meetings to discuss how their online teaching is progressing. All in all, there were some very positive comments despite the challenges. Well, thanks again for joining us for this episode of Domains 21 and we look forward to more information and hopefully a brighter future for teaching online. Thank you. Goodbye.