46 Language Teaching
Emergency Remote Teaching A Whole New Ballgame Compiled by Dr. David E. Shaffer
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
July 2020
EDUCATION
D
ue to the COVID-19 outbreak, public schools and universities throughout Korea have been forced to move their classes from their traditional face-to-face classroom environment to an online platform. The quickness with which this changeover took place left precious little time for English teachers to prepare – to redesign lesson plans, to get acquainted with an unfamiliar learning management system and new apps. Was teacher–student interaction feasible? Was student–student interaction possible? How could student assessment be conducted? These and many other questions, adjustments, and uncertainties seemed to present themselves all at once and needed to be promptly resolved. The present situation is so radically different from regular online teaching that it has been christened “emergency remote teaching.” It is a whole new ballgame! Presented below are the experiences of four area English teachers – teachers at the primary, secondary, and university levels who are members of KOTESOL’s Gwangju-Jeonnam Chapter – and their accounts of how they have dealt with emergency remote teaching.
of Hofstadter’s Law? It goes something like this: Tasks always take 20 percent longer than you expect – even if you account for Hofstadter’s Law. I experience this everyday with online teaching.
Everything Takes Longer
There are some positive things arising from this experience, too. For one, being forced to cede to online instruction, I now have a deeper understanding of how to make use of blended learning in the future. I also feel that this experience will give stakeholders a renewed appreciation for the role that schools, universities, and learning institutes provide to our communities. Moreover, this experience has been a good reminder of the need to accept things how they are as opposed to how we wish them to be.
Dr. Ian Moodie is an associate professor in the Department of English Education at Mokpo National University in Muan, just north of Mokpo. He has been teaching in Korea for 15 years and for the past three years has been teaching English education majors at MNU. Here is his account. When I first heard that we were going to teach online, I was relieved and not surprised. At that time, COVID-19 had already been deemed a global pandemic, many major universities had already switched to distance learning, and the major sports leagues of the world had suddenly shut down for the season, which made it clear to me that this virus was the real deal. However, that relief soon turned to uncertainty – and then to a mild frustration in realizing that everything I wanted to do was going to take a lot longer than I thought it would. Have you heard
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At first, I tried to match my online coursework and activities as closely as I could to my previous lectures. However, I soon felt that this was not the best approach and have since modified the materials to better suit the medium. My courses (whether they be in pedagogy, English language, or linguistics) tend to involve a great deal of collaborative activities, but this has been harder to pull off online – harder for me to plan and harder for the students to complete. My students expressed a preference to be able to do the coursework at a time of their choosing and to not have to login at specific times for lectures or to do activities. Thus, my classes now involve mostly asynchronous learning, and I have had to accept that while this is not an ideal approach for efficacious language teaching and teacher training, it is a pragmatic approach to get through the semester.
The Missing Feedback Loop
Brennand Kennedy teaches undergraduates at Dongshin University in Naju, just south of Gwangju. He has been teaching in Korea for six years and for two years at Dongshin. Here is his account. When our university made the decision to transition to online courses this spring, I had very mixed feelings. In
6/25/2020 12:43:52 PM
