Moodle

I have been working steadily for the past year and a bit on preparing English for Academic Purposes papers to be delivered entirely on the net... ai yi yi... what a great project, but so much work - so much to think about and prepare in the background. It's amazing to think how much face-to-face teaching involves the teacher's dynamic interaction as needed - s/he carries so much in his/her head... which in a net course has to be anticipated and catered for.

And ... how does one teach speaking on the net... considering that there may be students studying in a time zone 17 hours behind the teacher. Challenging.
We've actively taught oral presentation skills, with the use of video as example... and by breaking down each element that we want to target and inviting the students to submit the sections separately (after all, video files are very large) and we're assuming that the students a) have the technology to video themselves in the first place, b) have the ability to work with video files at all, and are capable to keeping such to less than 20MB, which is the cut off upload size specified by our moodle administrators. It will be interesting. Pedagogically, I think we're ok, but we are making some rather significant assumptions, which potentially could be marginalizing.

In another course we've introduced a little applet called nano-gong, which is a click and talk javascript plug-in - really funky! With that we're hoping to involve the students in threaded discussions... spoken rather than the usual written bulletin board forums that Learning Management Systems are so good at. What's smooth about nano-gong is that it makes an already compressed wave file, which is ideal for speaking, as we don't need high quality sound. Love it. It's still a little clunky in the application though, as we don't seem to be able to have the applet appear in the same place as the forum... working on this. But in the meantime the work around is that the students click into the applet, record their posting - save it - go back to the forum - open a discussion and upload their saved file - voila, contribution to threaded spoken dialogue. Has anyone done anything like this before?