Online ESL Teaching 01: Teaching Platforms Process, Notes and Reviews

I’ve been looking (for a couple of years now!) at a number of platforms where I can hang some videos and share teacher ideas.

The idea actually began to take form over ten years ago. While working at a language academy here in Spain, the local government offered a training course in online teaching. My boss thought it would be a good idea if a couple of his teachers took this course, looking ahead to how he might be able to cash in on what was being presented as a future trend in private educational alternatives.

The course itself was around 200 hours of online training on a Moodle-based platform. We were told that the cost of setting up the class (from programming Moodle to creating the actual content from scratch) had cost around 40 thousand Euros. This was the future of education, they announced, and my colleague Caroline and I began milling through hours of material covering content ranging from basic pedagogical concepts to how to apply them to online distance learning / teaching.

I didn’t get a very good grade in that class, mainly because I protested against some of the more “cutesy” material we were given — simple video games and GIF animations that seemed to try to replace actual information with attention-getting and maintaining computer graphics.

This class was before the creation of video talking-head classes was considered a standard, and we were expected to design a class based on what seemed to me simplified, childish game playing and time-consuming activity to keep the interest of the distant student on the course. Content played a second fiddle to design and standards yet in their infancy (and thus, sometimes quite infantile!)

Years have gone by (as they tend to do!) and the concept of online distance education has somewhat matured. I’m still quite interested in participating in what may become a revolution in education. I’ve been developing classes on verbs in English, based upon my handbook “Verbs in the Universe of Discourse“. I also spent about three years periodically correcting English exams for Japanese students in Academic English. My preparation work has now come to the point where I have begun “shopping around” for an appropriate platform for the material I have to offer.

I won’t obscure the fact that this is an attempt to develop a work-from-home teaching job. The day job is fine and dandy; however, the boss and I are not getting any younger (those years tending to go by….) and he’s pretty sure that he’s only got another five to six years before he decides to retire. I have even less in me, simply because the job is highly unstimulating.

Getting the teacher training material online would take me back to the days of itinerant teaching I was forced to leave behind me when the Spanish government required me to have a work contract in order to become a legal resident. So, making a retirement wage is definitely part of the plan.

The next few posts, then will take a look at the different platforms I’m trying out with their free access. I’ll probably take you all through some of the steps, definitely will explain the good, bad and ugly of each, maybe even decide on one of them to settle my work, so this will be my own personal notes on the process that can also be considered a review of each platform. It’s mostly for me, but will maybe be of use to you as well.

peace,
revel.