EVOLVING ROLES OF THE FUTURE-PROOF TEACHER IN A GUIDED AUTONOMOUS LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

For many years, language centres have been including multimedia sessions to their pedagogical approach. The paradigm has obviously shifted from teacher-led language labs to various types of student-centred guided autonomous learning. Since 1999, the University of Lausanne Language centre introduced such a learning design, where the learners are encouraged to develop their independent language learning (Holec, 1979).

Despite being an innovative approach, there seemed to be a gap to bridge between the learning environment and the learner. Student’s evaluations were pointing to problems of accessing and understanding how to find their way and learn efficiently in such an environment.

Therefore, a teachers’ task force was created in 2014 to rethink and improve three main aspects of the whole learning design:
1) the user-friendliness of the platform and the methodology of our learning approach;
2) the emphasis on the time-dimension of the autonomy process;
3) the teachers’ roles in each step of the learning process (in class, in the multimedia centre, on-line).

Several concrete measures were implemented to increase students’ awareness and ability to use the learning design and environment. Besides a few changes in the layout and adding more interactive resources, the core of the improvement was training teachers/colleagues to be involved in bridging the gap mentioned. Their role appears to be fourfold: a linguistic role (giving feedback on the language activities), a cognitive role (offering advice and learning strategies), a motivational / affective role (maintaining motivation), and a technical role (giving support on the use of the multimedia devices). The obvious challenge in such a situation was to shift colleagues’ mind-sets from being teachers to being advisors and facilitators (Barbot, 2006). Little by little, they have become aware of their crucial role in encouraging and stimulating learners on their path to autonomy.

An increase in learners’ satisfaction has been observed during the last semesters, as far as the multimedia sessions are concerned. The roles of and the relationship with the “teacher” are also more clearly perceived by both learners and teachers. This has convinced us of the importance of flexibility and adaptability in a world of constantly evolving learning technologies, helping us to understand the role of the future-proof teacher.