Abstract:

On paper, online materials development and its different stages of planning, designing, recording, presenting and marketing seem untroublesome for language teachers as materials developers. However, the current literature shows that in practice nearly all these stages can challenge language teachers not treated by specific courses about new technologies. This research aimed to determine the difficulties university language teachers encountered while dealing with online materials development. The study covered issues of creating audio and video podcasts for teaching English language, through a contemporary lens, and brought some solution to these troublesome processes via providing participants with new trends, such as visual thinking strategies, podcasting, screencasting and marketing. These endeavors were contrived by the researcher in a way to meet the needs of university language teachers who were the participants of this study to deal with the current online materials developmental issues. The researcher’s conjecture embraces the notion that arts/content/online marketing, podcasting, screencasting and visual thinking strategies were positive and possible traits for online materials development. This qualitative study tried to provide guidelines for designing audio and visual online English materials by non-native EFL university teachers using visual thinking strategies and arts, online and content marketing strategies. First, it began with 10 University professors of Islamic Azad University-South Tehran Branch who teach TEFL courses to B.A. students. All these participants answered MBTI questionnaire, Personality Test and Job Satisfaction, Three-D Test, and Spatial Recognition Test. The researcher interviewed them, and the data were codified. They produced audio and video podcasts on two parallel topics as pre-test, and then they received the treatments on Telegram in the form of the researcher-designed audios and videos and YouTube samples. As a post-test they made another audio and video podcasts with two more parallel topics. Then, three experts who are university professors evaluated the two sets of recorded data. Finally, all the interpretations and analysis were presented in different graphs and charts along with researcher’s interpretation based on theoretical frameworks. Besides, this research has some worthwhile pedagogical implications. The most productive one is that all the treatments can be used in teacher education, and they can turn into a task-based coursebook benefiting to M.A. TEFL students along with its soft copies. Another worthy implication is that it deals with teachers’ needs analysis. Teachers need to know new applications for developing online materials and then they should become aware of different ways to present them to the online audiences. Therefore, it can change almost negative perspective of teachers’ attitude towards online materials development via providing useful tools and techniques to become better producers of their knowledge.

Keywords:

Teacher education, online materials development, arts/content/online marketing, Visual Thinking Strategies.