Dr. Maha Atmeh
College of Humanities
Department of French Language
Why e-Learning?
Being a student-centered learning approach, I decided to try the e-Learning with my French courses. I found how much it enables the teacher to perform efficiently and enhance student’s ability for research, teamwork, group learning, and auto-assessment.
My aim was to change the learning environment and experience new methods in technology with physical and virtual lessons, not to mention the effective way of communicating with students at any time.
How to perform the tasks?
In the beginning, my role was to attend the training sessions held by the e-Learning Centre, which contributed greatly to the development of my proficiency in IT and I started to create my own courses afterwards. At first, my tasks were restricted to adding some files and documents without any real interactions with students. I used to spend a lot of time on discovering all the commands of Moodle that are to be used while creating my course. I also referred regularly to the e-Learning Centre for assistance. Then I began being more involved in creating the course (form and content) and I found that it was interesting to organize it myself in such a way that each section should contain objectives, activities and content, all related to the ILOs of the course. This helped me not only in organizing the teaching materials, but also in keeping in contact with my students who might miss some information in class. Indeed, the content doesn’t repeat the lecture, but rather adds and complements what has been discussed before in class
Compared to classical lecture tasks, assignments and events are regular for each week. Thus students are invited to consult their accounts, as they have information to follow, and evaluate the tasks to be performed during a given time. For example: watching a video document and commenting on it during the lecture or at home enhances students’ communication skills in French. Online tests and questions are also used as a different form of student assessment.
What next?
I suppose that e-Learning should become blended within our university in order to feel the change, but without being overwhelming. Incorporating the culture of e-Learning in our teaching/learning methods is the first step towards this promising aim.
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