Background
This design project started out when Professor Raquel Lodeiro decided to find a new way to execute her required conversation corner activities in her course. She had found that students were no longer consistently attending conversation corner because it was hosted in person, on a different day from normal class time, and in a different build. Starting in the fall of 2018, we reviewed her goals for increasing dialog without requiring the students to share the same time and space. Do to the COVID-19 pandemic, more of the course has been designed to go online with iterations running in hybrid and fully online formats.
Design Considerations
Students needed to participate in their language speaking skills, listening and speaking, without the burden of a separate time and location from their regular class period. The learning objective to build conversational fluency is critical to Spanish language acquisition: in this case, the instructor relied on a third-party for the students to learn accents and pronunciation help, but could not bring that third-party in to continue the conversational corners if it went online. The biggest detriment to making the learning experience asynchronous is that it removes the practice of speaking extemporaneously. In this way, the faculty member decided to rearrange the focus of extemporaneity to a separate project and not on the conversation corner.
After this initial project, the design considerations encouraged a full course revision. For Summer 2020, we launched a fully online version of SPAN 1. For Fall 2020, we launched completely revised SPAN 1 and SPAN 2 courses for a fully online, synchronously taught course format.
Phase 1
- Speaking & Listening Practice
- The students must be provided a way to record themselves and hear one another in a digital forum.
- Time & Space Requirement
- The students should not be required to speak and listen to each other synchronously but be provided an asynchronous format for conversation.
Phase 2
- Adopting an Open Educational Resource (OER)
- Replaced the existing textbook with an OER text that was integrated into the learning management system
- Redesigning the Scope & Sequence of Learning
- Replaced the original weekly course structure with a structure aligned to the textbook chapters.
Development
The development process involved using the Canvas LMS to create course experiences involving the replacement for the conversation corners and then revising the learning sequence. I managed our team including the faculty member and student worker through the process of developing the modules, writing instructions, and creating assessments. I assisted the faculty member with the review of the OER textbook and managed the adoption process including reviewing copyright needs, integration into the learning management system, and assessing the learners’ interactions with the text.
The conversation corner was reproduced using the educational technology VoiceThread. This tool allowed the instructor to post prompts, images, videos, and other content for the learners to engage with. Then, the learners were required to post back in spoken Spanish. This met the learning objectives of having the students listen to a native Spanish speaker, the instructor, and speak back to one another in an asynchronous format.
Examples
![Screenshot of the VoiceThread interface in SPAN 2](https://sites.psu.edu/willingworth/files/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-04-at-3.47.27-PM.png)
![A screenshot of a learning module in SPAN 2](https://sites.psu.edu/willingworth/files/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-04-at-3.51.09-PM.png)