e-Learning Initiatives in China: Pedagogy, Policy and Culture

Section 2: Designing and Delivering Online Courses in China

Designing and Delivering Online Courses in China 33 Section 2 Designing and Delivering Online Courses in China 34 Section 2 This section focuses on issues associated with the design and delivery of online courses in China, and explores the following crucial questions: • What types of online courseware design are currently widespread in China, and what are their relative strengths and weaknesses? • How can online courseware be designed so that learner autonomy (which is so important for online study) is promoted? • Studying online can be a lonely experience, so how can the courseware be designed in order to facilitate the building of communities of online learners? • To what extent is it feasible for foreign languages to be taught wholly online, or is it more effective if online learning is integrated with face-to-face learning opportunities? • Effective e-learning tutors are vital to the success of an online course, so how can they best be trained? Chapter 3, Learning by Multimedia and Multimodality, by Gu, provides very helpful background information on Web-based courseware design in the Chinese context. He identifies and illustrates six types of design that are current in China, and analyses their strengths and weaknesses from both policy and pedagogic perspectives. He presents a number of principles that can be used for evaluating courseware design, and argues that the ‘Learning-process-model Design’ is the most effective. In Chapter 4, McGrath, Sinclair and Chen take up the issue of learner autonomy. They review the literature on learner autonomy from bothWestern and Chinese perspectives, and then demonstrate how they designed materials for a course on the methodology of English Language teaching that aimed to promote learner autonomy. They illustrate how they offered ‘scaffolded’ experiences in the following: making choices, assessing self, monitoring progress, consciously reflecting on learning, and making independent decisions. The authors then describe the participants’ responses to the materials, which were very positive, but they emphasize the crucial importance of learners receiving excellent e-tutor support. Successful autonomous learning does not necessarily mean learning in isolation; on the contrary, it can entail effective co-operation with others. This is the theme taken up by Hall, Hall and Cooper in Chapter 5. They argue that courseware designers need consciously to aim at promoting interactivity and social cohesion online and they then illustrate how this can be done. They describe two learning tasks that were designed to build a sense of community among learners and to promote appropriate self-disclosure, and they report how learners reacted to these activities. Chapter 6 turns to a somewhat different yet vitally important question: whether all aspects of foreign language learning can be fostered online, or whether the online courseware needs to be integrated with face-to-face learning opportunities. Marsh et al. argue strongly for an integrated approach, and describe how they achieved this in the design of their CUTE (Chinese University Teacher Training in English) course. The final chapter in this section, by Joyes and Wang, takes up the crucial issue of the training of e-learning tutors. However brilliantly a course is designed, it needs tutors to provide effective support for the learners. Yet course providers are faced with a dilemma: Designing and Delivering Online Courses in China 35 should they train their e-learning tutors to operate on this specific course (e.g. familiarize them with types of learning activities included in the course, and with the technical functionality and characteristics of the technical platform being used), or should they provide them with more generic training that is more broadly applicable? Joyes and Wang grapple with this question in Chapter 7 and propose a generic framework for the training of e-learning tutors that can be used across a very wide variety of contexts. Samples of many of the online materials described in this section can be viewed on the eChina-UK website: http://www.echinauk.org/. The website also provides further rationale for their design. 36 Section 2 ...