Abstract:

The goal of this presentation is to share the experience and insights from two English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pilot courses delivered in 2020/2021 at Levinsky college of Education in Israel as part of the Erasmus+ Love.Dist@nce project. This Erasmus+ project aims to improve the access to and quality of inclusive distance learning for unique and disadvantaged high-education students in Israel and Georgia by supporting institutional capacities through the reinforcement and provision of student support services in both countries.

This pilot course relies on the project’s “holistic view and solutions in building total capacity" required to transition from the traditional, frontal model of teaching in institutions of higher education to distance learning (p.4). The Love.Dist@nce proposal for teaching unique populations in virtual environments contains six domains which will be implemented in this course:
1. The pedagogical domain relies on the learning-centered approach and emphasizes emotional, social and cognitive aspects of learning. The chosen approach emphasizes motivation, enthusiasm, and interest, relying on learners’ prior knowledge and life experience. This will be achieved by choosing topics relevant to students’ lives, discerning individual needs and catering for them, and allowing choice of topics and tasks in order to enhance motivation.
2. The design and planning domain, focusing on appropriate tools and design principles to accentuate emotional involvement, accessibility, engagement, collaboration, support and student choice.
3. Content domain: appropriate content in line with the learner-centered approach and the course’s learning goals and objectives. This pilot course in English language skills will focus on topics relevant to the students’ lives with an emphasis on multiculturalism and emotionally engaging topics, suitable for a heterogenous class.
4. Technological domain: using the Moodle platform, and adding various technological tools in order to provide support to unique populations and to allow rapport with the lecturer and the other students.
5. Social and communication domain: creating respectful relationships between the lecturer and the students and among students, taking various unique populations into consideration. Creating a learning community using different collaborative methods.
6. Management: special attention to management of time, roles, expectations, surveys, contact with students and ethical issues.

The two pilot courses which participated in this project included 94 students from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, as well as students with special needs. In this presentation, we will share the needs-detection surveys which were utilized in these EAP courses, the methods of instruction based on Universal Design, Social emotional Learning and motivation theories, and the conclusions drawn from the outcomes and feedback surveys of these two courses.

Keywords:

Erasmus+, English for Academic Purposes, unique populations, inclusion.