by Claire Kaku, University of Shimane
Before joining the English teaching family at The University of Shimane, I was a teacher who had taught online very little. At the beginning of April, I was excited to meet my students in person.
Later on, when all the classes were switched to online ones, I have to admit that I felt upset and helpless for some time. Luckily, I have been fully supported by the English teaching family. Steve kindly spared time for Moodle orientation for me. Mariko designed a fun and helpful workshop about Zoom and provides ongoing professional advice for my concerns.
Melissa selflessly offered to answer my ‘silly’ questions and organized workshops on Zoom and Moodle. Thanks to these workshops, my confidence grew. Eleanor always responds timely to my ER questions. Teamwork provides me with great strength to be a better online teacher. Fresh ideas spark when I am surrounded with excellent colleagues.
I’ve thought a lot about what my online classroom should offer to students. Before each class, I remind myself of these two principles: provide meaningful support to my online learners and convey positivity that the students can succeed.
I believe online students are typically working by themselves during Covid-19. They can’t ask for clarification when they first encounter instructions like they do in physical classrooms. Therefore, for their Moodle assignments, I write down the directions as if we were having a face-to-face conversation.
Students don’t need to guess what I want them to do because they can always study my examples to see my expectations. Many of them are motivated to do better on their assignments. Therefore, to encourage them to commit themselves continuously, I always play the role of my students’ biggest fan and spare time to praise their successful outcomes. I enjoy seeing their sweet smiles and laughter after receiving my positive feedback.
As online learners, students write more English emails than they usually do. However, I found they were failing to write as politely as they do in Japanese: not using greetings and being very direct when asking questions.
Pragmatic errors can be more disastrous than grammatical ones. Pointing out their impoliteness did not seem to help. To demonstrate caring for our busy online learners, I provided them with a model to follow. They quickly made use of it, and now their emails are more polite.
As weeks passed by, another problem emerged. From students’ emails, I realized online learning has caused them to communicate less with people, and some of them have begun to have time management problems.
They’ve begun to oversleep, overeat, and delay their assignments. To explore deeper, I changed the topic of the assignment for that week to ‘My lifestyle during Covid-19’. I wanted to discover how students were arranging their lives and if they had found any problems. Time management is an important skill for one’s life. I hope I can help them with it, even a little.
Online-only classes are tiring, and thus not the best choice. But as a teacher, I try to make online classes an inviting and pleasant place to be.
