Abstract:

School of Languages Teaching and Developing Through Online Learning: Vocabulary Teaching and Learning (SL-TeDOL, VTL) is a free online teacher training course, designed by a couple of voluntary instructors at Sabancı University, Istanbul, to help ELT teachers in Turkey revise or improve their vocabulary teaching and learning skills. One of the missions of Sabancı University is to share the knowledge and skills gained through institutional studies with the environment for the benefit of the society. Education is indispensable in that it helps improve the knowledge and skills of a society. However, due to the uneven distribution of resources, some members of a society may be educationally disadvantaged. Unfortunately, in this fast-changing global world, the state education systems cannot always catch up with the technological benefits. As a university, in the past, we provided a lot of support to different groups of ELT teachers working at state schools by visiting different cities and giving weekly educational seminars. However, this kind of training is neither sustainable nor satisfactory for all kinds of teachers with different needs and backgrounds. Providing free education through online systems has become more important in this respect. The SL-TeDOL, VTL course has been supported by our university in terms of time and resources. We, as the designers of the course, would like to share our experience of the preparation, design and administration process. We will also share some key points and lessons learnt based on the process and feedback from the pilot course participants.

Keywords:

Vocabulary teaching and learning, online training, pilot programme.