Moving Learning Materials from Paper to Online and Beyond
Thomas N. Robb, Toshiko Koyama, and Judy Noguchi
Constant advances in computer technology have greatly expanded the range of educational tools and methods but the realities of the classroom environments and limited budgets often make implementation difficult. This project was done to detail a mentoring process for moving two types of courses from paper to online and "beyond," i.e. to a full-scale e-learning milieu.
The first course was a specialist vocabulary learning component of an ESP (English for specific purposes) curriculum in pharmaceutical sciences. About 260 first-year students were given a 10-minute vocabulary quiz at the beginning of each 90-minute class that met once a week. The vocabulary items consisted of terms based on Greek and Latin affixes that are commonly used in the medical sciences. For example, "gastr(o)-" that refers to "stomach" appears in "gastritis," "epigastric," "gastrectomy." By learning to associate "gastr(o)" with stomach and its Japanese equivalent "i," the students should be able to apply this knowledge to expanding their vocabulary range. The quizzes were composed of sentences (averaging 15 words) that included both the technical term and related vocabulary that the students need to acquire. This portion of the project entailed the uploading of paper quiz items onto a Moodle site for mobile phone access.
The second course was a content course aimed at preparing students for a proficiency test in computer literacy. Subjects were approximately 50 first-year students of a college in Japan. In this course, they studied not only the basic skills to use computer but also computer literacy and ethics from the designated textbook including more than 200 quizzes. These quizzes were also uploaded to the Moodle site for computer access. Student preferences of paper and online materials were examined using questionnaires and access records, and pre- and post-test scores were used to evaluate student progress.
For both the language and content courses, the problems encountered and the measures taken to move the courses from mainly paper-based to online-based materials are described. We hope that the mentoring model used here can be useful for both content and language instructors who wish to move from paper to online materials but lack the necessary expertise and budget for this. Future possibilities for development will also be outlined.
Thomas Robb (Ph.D. in Linguistics) is a Professor of English at Kyoto Sangyo University. He is President of PacCALL and chair of the WorldCALL2008 Scholarship Committee. Currently, his main interest is finding effective ways to apply Moodle to language learning.
Toshiko Koyama (Ph.D. in Foreign Language Education) is currently Associate Professor of English at Osaka Ohtani University, Osaka, Japan. She also teaches the basic computer skills to college students. Her research focuses on the application of new technologies to foreign language education.
Judy Noguchi (Ph.D., applied linguistics; M.Ed., TESL) is Professor of English in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Mukogawa Women's University, Nishinomiya, Japan. She is interested in developing ESP e-learning materials.
