Apparently I don’t have enough to do preparing for my 6,000-mile move from England to Ecuador, so on Saturday afternoon I made a killer French onion soup and then signed up for my very first MOOC.
Jumping on the MOOC bandwagon
I know, I know, I’m about five years behind everyone else. What’s my excuse? Well, up until last year I was still busy with, y’know, real university. But after another year out in the big, wide world of work, I needed no excuse for a little extra bedtime reading and reflection. (Plus my mum runs a MOOC and she’s been going on and on about how great they are, so I thought it was about time I had a go.)
So I signed up to Coursera, filled out my profile and enrolled myself onto my first course: “What future for education?” Designed and delivered by the UCL Institute of Education, it’s supposed to make me think about the key actors in education (e.g. learners, teachers, schools) and what the system is going to look like in the future. Sounds perfect for someone relatively new to teaching!
First things first
Okay then. Week number one is ambiguously titled “How do we learn?” and the very first assignment is to answer the following question:
Reflect on your previous learning experiences. Think about one particularly successful and one unsuccessful learning experience. Consider what were the conditions that made this experience successful or unsuccessful for you and what this tells you about your own preferred ways to learn.
My first thought is that this looks very familiar. In fact, it’s basically identical to the first pre-course question I answered on my CELTA. And now I’m wondering if it’s cheating to copy and paste that answer here instead of actually doing the assignment again.
But in the name of honesty, let’s do this properly. It might even be interesting to see how my answer changes with the benefit of an initial teaching qualification and a year’s experience.
A ‘particularly successful’ learning experience
The first thing that springs to mind is the ‘French for Academic Purposes’ course I took in my final year of university. The class had a grand total of seven students and ran for two hours a week over the entire teaching year (which, at UCL, adds up to 20 weeks).
The success of it was at least partially due to the small class size and the immediate availability of great learning resources (access to a legal deposit library, round-the-clock IT services and support, well-equipped classrooms). But mostly it was down to our teacher, Mireille.
The importance of rapport
It’s very common in adult foreign language teaching to be on a first-name basis with your teacher, and perhaps that helped to establish a good rapport right from the beginning. But the academic relationship we developed had started two years earlier, when she had taught the first foreign language class I’d ever taken at university. Thanks to that year, I already had a great deal of respect for her as an academic thinker and an effective teacher, and she was already familiar with my particular style of thinking, learning and working.
So the groundwork had been laid, but what about the actual lessons? She more or less followed what I now recognise as the CELTA skills lesson format, that is to say starting by setting a context, introducing and analysing an academic text, delving deeper into the vocabulary presented, reacting to the reading material and then producing a critical piece or oral debate as a response. The methodology was textbook, but it never felt repetitive or predictable.
Context is everything
Choosing a context can make or break a lesson in the first ten minutes, but the possibilities are often limited by the scope of the course and the level of the students. Not so with this course, which aimed to prepare us for postgraduate study in a French-speaking institution; we were extremely high-level students open to any possible research area.
Instead of trying to cater to this impossibly broad range of study, Mireille chose topics that was clearly excited to teach: politics, gender studies, the European Union and sociology. Her subject knowledge was nothing short of encyclopaedic; her unfailing enthusiasm elevated what could have been memorising dates and treaty names in a foreign language to the pivotal study of the formation of a new world power, all from a fascinating global viewpoint. This was also the first time I’d been presented with gender studies as an academic discipline and it led to me (a Mathematics major!) producing a 4000-word piece on the state of the glass ceiling in France, in French. The examiners gave me 75 for that essay and I’m still oddly proud of it today.
Choose your words carefully
As for the texts themselves, she had personally collected every single one from academic journals and specially collated them just for our class. I once showed the booklet to the Parisian law student who lived across the hall from me; she couldn’t believe how advanced the language was. There was no holding back, no aiming too high, and Mireille’s certainty that we could cope with the material meant that we just did.
The choice of material was also very intelligent for a university with a large proportion of international students and a heavy emphasis on gender equality, which meant that the productive tasks at the end of the lesson had a ridiculously large range of cultural influences and viewpoints, and would frequently veer off into side-discussions about 1980s French government and the like. And I, against all odds and totally contrary to my fiercely logical, analytical nature, discovered that I actually liked the social sciences.
The story so far
So what do we gather about my personal learning preferences? I obviously value a teacher’s subject knowledge, the setting of high standards, and engaging material to learn from (even if it’s outside my main area of study).
But I think what I loved about Mireille’s class was her willingness to go above and beyond for us, her learners: taking the time to hand-pick authentic source material, pushing us to perform far beyond our own expectations for ourselves by encouraging high-level debate on advanced issues, and drawing out the vast range of experience and influences present in the class to create a much richer and more diverse learning experience for us all. In short, I think what I value the most in a classroom is the unfailing dedication of the teacher to their learners.
This is a strange conclusion for me to arrive at, mostly because I know I am fiercely independent in all things, not least in the classroom. I think Mireille’s constant support gave me the courage to develop my own opinions and present them with confidence; without that, I would have been quite happy to sit in silence at the back of the class, cram for the exam and leave with a decent grade but without actually engaging with the course.
And on that note
Well, that got a little out of hand – I’m surprised how much I had to say! I’ll leave the ‘unsuccessful learning experience’ for another blog post. In the meantime, you’ll find me making a start on the actual course material for this week, and maybe packing my bags for my intercontinental move on Monday …
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Have you ever taken an online course? What did you enjoy about it? What would you do differently next time? Would you try a MOOC, if you haven’t done one before? Let me know in the comments!
260° West 