DEVELOPMENT OF A VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITY FOR THE TEACHING OF A C1 LEVEL ENGLISH WRITING COURSE

This work is part of the Doctoral Thesis written by the author in September 2011, and describes the development of a VLC (Virtual Learning Community) for the teaching of a specialised course on English writing at C1 level as described in the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference)

The course was taught virtually to a group of students with a high level of English who voluntarily applied for it guided by their interest in improving their writing skills. All of them were adults, most of them with previous qualifications in different areas of knowledge, who met the requirements established for the admission in this course, namely, B2 certificate of English or equivalent and medium level in the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology).

During the course the roles of students and teacher changed so that the former became members of a virtual learning community, sharing interests and objectives, and the latter played the role of a facilitator of the process.

The course developed in a virtual environment based on the LMS (Learning Management System) Moodle and included the attendance to two sessions: an initial one in which the basic instructions and explanations on the course were given and a closing one in which the course and its results were analyzed. The course took six months (November-April) and was structured in different content sections.

The main objective of this work was to analyze the differences between the traditional methodological model based on the teacher-student relationship and the transmission of knowledge from the first to the second and the model adopted in the VLC centred on the student-student relationship and the social creation of knowledge with the teacher acting as a facilitator of the whole process.


Results:
The results of the study show that in a VLC the role of the teacher is not central to its development. The teacher becomes a member of the community with the specific role of facilitating the relationships within it.

The student-student relationship is capital and the knowledge does not flow from the teacher to the students but it is created socially grows out of the relationships among all the members of the community, including the teacher.

Finally, thanks to the virtual character of the environment, the time and space constrains disappear and make it easy for the members of the VLC to organize their learning process.