FREELY ACCESSIBLE ONLINE LANGUAGE TEACHER TRAINING PLATFORM

The development of Web 2.0 technology has enabled us to interact with web pages, making it possible to give online distance learning classes in collaborative mode. Using this technology, the authors and the research group assumed that it would be possible to provide researchers, instructors and teachers with an innovative handy tool for assessing language classes. Thus a new video-on-demand platform equipped with foreign language class analysis functions was started to be developed in 2012, and it was completed in the spring of 2014, followed by further adjustments to be finely tuned for two years. The development was backed up by the HATO Project, a joint research project to improve post-graduate level of English teacher training program by four teacher training universities in Japan.

Four major functions were installed in the LMS called Glexa. The first one was the VOD learning function equipped with a video authoring tool and a discussion board. Its function looks similar to that of YouTube in that participants can share films but it has the distinctive features which makes class observation effective and elaborate. It is that instructors can upload videos and freely insert subtitles at any scene in a video, and the inserted subtitles are displayed as a list in the columns below the screen. If a learner clicks one of these subtitles in the list, s/he can watch its correspondent scene with a task prepared by the teacher and then submit his/her answer for the assigned task. At the same time s/he can share other participants’ answers and make discussions on the same scenes collaboratively. The second one, the core development, was the class analysis function used to analyze interactions between a teacher/student(s) and student(s) occurring in a language class using the Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) scheme advocated by Spada, N., & Fröhlich. (1995). When this function is selected for class analysis, a COLT table is automatically prepared with the filmed class targeted for analysis. The user first decides where to start and to end one episode of a lesson, for example, a greeting at the start of the lesson lasting two minutes, and then start coding the episode by choosing particular categories of COLT so that they will correspond to the features of the episode. This process is repeated until the coding work is completed, when the film ends. There are quite a few advantages for using this function. The duration of each episode of a lesson is automatically calculated and displayed, and all the coding results are stored and can be opened to the class members, which enables learners to make use of other learners’ coding results to examine the validity of their own coding. Another two functions were the lecture delivery function by which learners can observe a lecture from many different places, and the video chat function used to discuss a filmed class collaboratively from several different places at the same time. This newly developed platform was named CollaVOD.

Several sessions of collaborative online courses for pre-service teachers were conducted by 2015. After the sessions, questionnaires were given to ask about the easiness, usefulness, applicability, etc. of the CollaVOD. The results show that this kind of online collaborative platform is highly efficient for pre-service teachers to discover new perspectives for observing a language class.