THE SHARED COURSE INITIATIVE (SCI) IN CONTEXT:

New Directions in Distance Education

SpeakersCarl Blyth | University of Texas Austin Ed Dixon | University of Pennsylvania Carolin Fuchs | Columbia University Mirjam Hauck | Open University, UK Maggie Sokolik | UC Berkeley Lucas Swineford | Yale University Craig Wright | Yale University

Monday May 12, 2014 8:30 am - 4 pm

Yale University TEAL Classroom | 17 Hillhouse Ave

The symposium is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and organized by the Center for Language

Study at Yale.

Schedule Monday May 12, 2014

8:30 -9:00 Breakfast and Registration

9:00-9:15 Introduction and Welcome

9:15-10:15 Keynote | Language Learning for an Open World: Understanding the Global Impact of Open Education Carl Blyth

10:15-10:30 Coffee Break

10:30-11:15 A Framework for Multiliteracy Training in the Context of Collaborative Online Language Learning and Teaching Mirjam Hauck

11:15-12:00 Multiliteracy Skills and Multimodal Competence Through Task Sequencing in Language Education - Two Case Studies Carolin Fuchs

12:00-1:00 Lunch

1:00-1:45 Communicating in German Across Cultures: From F2F to MOOCs Ed Dixon

1:45-2:00 Coffee Break

2:00-2:45 What Makes an Effective Language MOOC? Maggie Sokolik

2:45-3:30 Online Education: Pathways For Yale Lucas Swineford & Craig Wright

3:30-4:00 Wrap-up

4:00 Reception

TEAL Classroom 17 Hillhouse Ave

Language Learning for an Open World: Understanding the Global Impact of Open Education This presentation gives an overview of the open education movement--its history and values, its practices and products, its successes and failures. Open education, an international grass-roots movement of educators and researchers, seeks to create an “open world” where people can fulfill their desire to learn by providing free and open access to education and knowledge. In an open world, students can get addition-al materials to help them succeed. Instructors can draw on high-quality digital resources that promote deeper learning. And academic researchers can develop their networks by trad-ing data with each other. In other words, open education is fundamentally about sharing ideas and intellectual property: pedagogical materials, teaching practices, and scientific data. Open educational resources (OER) represent the heart of this movement. As such, this presentation focuses on how foreign language OER can be translated, mixed together, broken apart and openly shared, increasing access and inviting fresh ap-proaches.

Presentations

Keynote Speaker

Carl Blyth Associate Professor University of Texas, Austin

Communicating in German Across Cultures: From F2F to MOOCs This presentation will examine the design and goals of the first language-learning MOOC on the Coursera platform. Course preparations for the MOOC will be explained within the con-text of the presenter’s years of experience with teaching in both F2F and in online courses at UPenn. Student perspectives will be included.

Ed Dixon Lecturer Technology Director University of Pennsylvannia

Presentations Presentations

Multiliteracy Skills and Multimodal Competence Through Task Sequencing in Language Education - Two Case Studies This contribution presents findings from two empirical case stud-ies, which included student teachers of ESL/EFL, online tutors, and German language learners from institutions in Germany, the UK, Poland and the US (see Fuchs, Hauck, & Müller-Hartmann, 2012). The telecollaborations took place in two different fall semes-ters and aimed at developing participants’ multiliteracy skills and multimodal competence. The ultimate goal was to promote learner autonomy (Benson, 2001) through a sequence of tasks (e.g., the analysis of websites and social networking tools) which then cul-minated in the design of intercultural language learning tasks. This presentation draws on data from virtual exchanges, questionnaires, journal entries, and tasks to illustrate how participants demonstrat-ed an increased awareness of the constraints and affordances of the different tools.

Carolin Fuchs Lecturer Teachers College, Columbia University

What Makes an Effective Language MOOC? MOOCs are commonly categorized into two types: cMOOCs (connectivist) which focus on self-organized learning, and xMOOCs, usually characterized as being content-driven. Language MOOCs, still in their infancy, do not fit neatly into either category. In this talk, I will examine the distinguishing features of language MOOCs, with an emphasis on their effec-tiveness. UC Berkeley’s College Writing 2x, a MOOC that took place in 2013/2014 enrolling over 150,000 students, will be discussed as a case study. The implications for online language learning will also be considered.

Maggie Sokolik Lecturer University of California Berkeley

Online Education: Pathways for Yale Yale University has been engaging with the world of online ed-ucation for more than a decade. The University is now develop-ing a pathway for the next phase of its online education efforts. The University has two overarching goals for online education initiatives. The first is to experiment with new pedagogy that can improve teaching and learning for students at Yale as well as new students who will be admitted to online educational programs. The second is to continue to amplify the impact of great Yale teaching beyond the campus. We will share a small number of projects that are meeting these goals and discuss some possibilities for the future.

Lucas Swineford Director, Digital Media and Dissemination Yale University

Craig Wright Professor Yale University

A Framework for Multiliteracy Training in the Context of Collaborative Online Language Learning and Teaching The need to prepare learners for meaningful participation in tech-nology-based activities and thus the need for digital competence (DC) is recognized in the scholarly literature and acknowledged as one of the 8 key competences for Lifelong Learning by the European Union. I will argue that collaborative online learning provides an ideal setting for developing DC. Training in this key competence should allow participants to comfortably move along the contin-uum from informed reception of technology-mediated input, via thoughtful participation in opinion-generating activities through to creative contribution. Particular consideration will be given to the fact that both the input and the output along this continuum are usually multimodal, i.e. draw on a variety of semiotic resources or modes such as “words, spoken or written; image, still and mov-ing; musical […] 3D models […]” (Kress, 2003). Learners who can comfortably alternate in their roles as “semiotic responders” and “semiotic initiators” (Coffin & Donohue, forthcoming) will reflect the success of training programmes which take account of multimo-dality as a core element of digital communicative literacy skills.

Mirjam Hauck Associate Head of Department Senior Lecturer The Open University

Bios

Keynote Speaker

Carl Blyth Associate Professor University of Texas Austin

Carl S. Blyth (PhD, Cornell Uni-versity) is Associate Professor of French Linguistics and Director of the Center of Open Educational Resources and Language Learn-ing (COERLL) at the University of Texas at Austin. His research includes computer-mediated discourse, corpus linguistics, cross-cultural and intercultur-al pragmatics, and pedagogical grammar. He has published on metalinguistic awareness, native and non-native role models for language learning, L2 narrative discourse, pedagogical norms, stance taking in interaction and open models for educational pub-lishing.

Speaker

Mirjam Hauck Associate Head of Department Senior Lecturer The Open University

Mirjam Hauck is a Senior Lec-turer and Associate Head of the Department of Languages (Faculty of Education and Language Stud-ies) at the Open University/UK. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on the use of technologies for the learning and teaching of languages and cul-tures covering aspects such as task design, tutor role and training, and digital literacy skills. Apart from regular presentations at confer-ences, seminars and workshops in Europe and the USA, she has served on the CALICO executive board and is a member of the EUROCALL executive committee. She is also a member of the edi-torial board of the CALL Journal and ReCALL. More recently her research and publications have centred on the impact of media-tion and the relevance of multi-modal communicative competence in online language learning and teaching contexts. She sees her interest in how the affordances of the new media shape online communication and interaction, in telecollaborative contexts in par-ticular, as the logical continuation of her earlier work.

Speaker

Carolin Fuchs Lecturer Teachers College,Columbia University

Carolin Fuchs, PhD, is Lecturer in the TESOL/Applied Linguistics Program at Teachers College, Co-lumbia University. Prior to joining Teachers College, she conducted research and taught at UC Berke-ley, Penn State University, Uni-versity of Phoenix, and Monterey Institute of International Studies. Her research interests within technology-based language learn-ing and teacher education include multiliteracies, language play, and Web 2.0 tools. She has conducted telecollaborative projects with par-ticipants at institutions in China, Cyprus, England, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, and South Africa. The nature of her research agenda is illustrated by publications and presentations at conferences in the US and in Europe.

Bios

Speaker

Ed Dixon Lecturer Technology Director University of Pennsylvannia

Ed Dixon Ph.D. in Germanic Lan-guages and Literatures, is Director for Technology of Penn Language Center and Lecturer for German at the University of Pennsylvania. He is active in a variety of areas related to classroom instruction, faculty support, and research pub-lications. From 2010 to 2012 Ed served as president of the North-east Association for Language Learning and Technology. In sum-mer 2010, he taught the first fully online language course for credit from the University of Pennsylva-nia and is now designing the first language course for the Coursera learning platform. In 2011, Ed received Penn’s affiliated faculty teaching award for distinguished teaching in the College of Liber-al and Professional Studies and is currently co-editing the 2015 Volume in CALICO’s Monograph Book Series

Speaker

Maggie Sokolik Lecturer University of California Berkeley

Maggie Sokolik received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from UCLA. She is the author of over twenty ESL and composition textbooks. She has also written for and been featured in several educational video projects, and continues this work in the MOOC, “The Principles of Written Com-munication.” This course has enrolled over 140,000 students to date. She is also the Editor of TESL-EJ, a peer-reviewed journal for ESL/EFL professionals. She has worked at UC Berkeley since 1992. She travels frequently to speak about grammar, writing, and instructor education, most recent-ly to Turkey, China, Mexico, and India.

Speaker

Lucas Swineford Executive Director, Digital Media and Dissemination Yale University

Lucas Swineford joined the Uni-versity in August 2007 and cur-rently serves as the Executive Director of the Office of Digital Dissemination & Online Learning. He also oversees the Yale Broad-cast Center. Lucas leads the efforts to support faculty, deans and Uni-versity initiatives to disseminate the best of teaching at Yale beyond the campus. In this capacity, he identifies the necessary technology components, ensures close coordi-nation with the General Counsel’s office for compliance with growing state regulatory issues and intellec-tual property matters, and through his team at the Yale Broadcast Center, creates new methods for online course capture. In 2011, Lucas partnered with Yale Summer Session Dean Bill Whobrey to de-liver the first-ever Yale College on-line courses for credit. In 2013, he worked in a similar capacity with the School of Forestry and Envi-ronmental Studies to offer their first online certificate course for professionals. He is also charged with overseeing the University’s partnership with Coursera and managing the future of the land-mark Open Yale Courses project.

Bios

Speaker

Craig Wright Professor Yale University

Craig Wright studied piano and music history at the Eastman School of Music (1962-1966) and went on to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology at Harvard (1966-1972). After a year teaching at the University of Kentucky in Lexington (1972-1973), Wright came to Yale, serving as chair of the Department of Music from 1986 to 1992 and be-coming the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music in 2006. In 2013 he was appointed as the inaugural academic director of online education at Yale. Wright was a co-chair (with Professor Paul Bloom) of the Yale College Committee on Online Ed-ucation, and he has taught both an online course for credit in Yale College Summer Session and a non-credit online Open Yale Course. He is the author of seven books and is one of the few individuals to be awarded the Dent medal (RMA), the Einstein prize (AMS), and the Kinkeldey award (AMS). In 2010 he was elected to member-ship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.