Session 3--Audio-Tutorial Approach

After reading the articles of this week, I have the same feelings as what Dr. Oliver indicated in Lecture 3—all the AT approach should and will be implemented on the Internet because it is way too efficient than the traditional Independent Study Session (No need to find a big place for learning carrels, to spend huge amount of money to print all the handouts, and to find people to stay at the learning center.). Besides, I really love the idea of Small Assembly Session (SAS). I agree with that, “one really learns a subject when one prepares to teach it,” it is really a good way to know if students have learned something as well as a great opportunity for them to learn from each other. I also like the idea of General Assembly Session (GAS). I am shocked that students did not like it at all. I cannot help but think that the activities in this session was not arranged appropriately because guest speakers and films that related to the course content should be very interesting and motivating. I even doubted that because the attendance is not compulsory, did the students who evaluated the GAS as useless actually attend to any one of the sessions? I believe the multi-sensory approach is appropriate for meeting students’ different learning needs and styles, so I would like to adopt SAS and GAS into my future courses for review or assessment purposes.

However, for foreign language teaching, I am concerned about some points of the AT approach. First of all, students have to be self-directed in the learning process. I have heard too many people told me that they tried thousand times to start learning a language in my life, but I seldom heard successful stories. Learning a skill that is not imperative to somebody’s life or that without a strong motivation plus no one to push you is very difficult. In addition, in my opinion, I always believe that language should be learned in an environment that you could actually use it. With no professionals to correct students’ pronunciation and no one to practice conversation with, the progression for them is limited. Again, I totally agree with the multiple approaches of the AT method, but I think these approaches should not replace the class meeting in school; they should be regarded as great supplemental resources.

Session 2--Keller Plan (Davis)

After reading the paper written by Davis et al., I am amazed that how fast distance education has progressed in just a decade. Lots of contents, which are about the efforts to overcome the deficiency of the program at that time, have been improved nowadays. Those barriers included that students had limited access to the learning package since it was only available to those on the UMR computer network or on CD sets and the recorded videos, which meant that the school had to mail those materials to off-campus students. That was definitely not an efficient way for both schools and students. Moreover, another deficiency was that those packages and videos were lack of instant interaction with colleagues and professors. After solving these problems, teachers and students alike can arrange their own schedule in a semester. Students will never have to worry about their different learning paces (no matter too slow or too fast) from others because the web-deployed course is completely self-paced.

Though the BEST TQM is not an efficient tool for off-campus students because of its availability, I like the ideas that it was used as a source of supplemental materials for the course. Especially, its CD format reminds me about interactive discs that broadly used for language learning recently. I think it would be great if I can design the content of interactive discs for my Mandarin students. That way, they cannot only practice the language at home whenever they want, but also learn in a fun way! Furthermore, for the younger kids who are not allowed to use Internet or students who has no Internet access at home, the interactive discs are more appropriate to them. In addition, Mandarin learning is getting more and more attention in the international society. If I could properly use the Internet-based instruction well, I can teach students all over the world in my office or even my home, and students can learn whenever and wherever they would like. How fantastic!

I think that lots of web-based course management system such as Moodle and Blackboard can solve the problems that the authors had faced at the beginning of the 21st century. I believe that Internet-based instruction provides the best environment for PSI.

Hi all!

Hey there,

This is a blog for the my reflections of ECI 517 Advanced Multimedia. I look forward to reading those articles and discussing with you all! Thanks for visiting my blog!