Abstract:

In the past years, the landscape of higher education in Finland has been shifting remarkably towards, among other things, more flexibility and accessibility. One aspect of such changes is a strong focus on blended and online teaching. The state-funded project Kielivarannon vahvistaminen korkeakouluissa ('Reinforcing language availability in higher education institutions'), or KiVAKO, launched in September 2018, aims to create new learning pathways for less widely studied languages in Finland by developing cooperation both at a national and a regional level.

Based on a questionnaire answered by 183 students about their initial motivation towards online language learning courses and about their previous experience, we observed that time management was both a major criteria in opting for an online course and one of the biggest challenges in completing such a course. This in turn led us to believe that this aspect needs to be addressed not only during the development stage but also during the learning process itself.

We will show how time management, teacher supervision and teacher-student interaction were dealt with by the course developers from the Chinese, French and Portuguese teams in planning their respective 15-credit study paths. During last autumn Chinese and Portuguese courses were launched as pilots and the participants of both groups were encouraged to share their experiences concerning thoss matters in a survey, once at mid-term and once at the end of the course.

Following our first presentation at the ICERI2019 conference, we will this time describe how we developed this crucial role of the teachers presence online within the KiVAKO project and how student feedback guided and inspired us to improve our second piloting stage of Portuguese and Chinese online courses, increasing teachers guidance and presence. We will also demonstrate the changes we made and comment on the results of the first pilot courses, as well as the first results of the second pilot course.

Keywords:

Online Language Learning, Language Learning, Teacher presence, Student motivation, Student retention, Guidance.