Abstract:

Each day that passes, technology is present in almost all aspects of our lives, at work, at home, in our spare time, and, of course, at school. The traditional face-to-face format is drifting apart from the hybrid and the fully online more trendy ways to create, design, and deliver content in courses aimed to a generation very familiar with technology. In fact, in the past 10+ years, colleges and universities are adding more and more fully online courses to go with the new demands in higher education. Particularly, Spanish I and Spanish II are two courses that students choose to fulfill their foreign language requirement in institutions all across the United States. Every semester these programs receive students with different interests, learning styles, and who are at different levels of Spanish knowledge. For that reason, the instructor has to accommodate his/her teaching to reach each and every student in a fully online environment. Having this in consideration, this presentation will explore how to design and implement an effective and rigorous online course to offer the best service and product to the 21st century students, from the lessons learned by transitioning from the traditional face-to-face student to a fully online instructor.

It is a fact that “[s]tudents of today are growing up with laptops, tablets, cell phones, and video calls, and they expect to use this technology in their daily interactions” (Larsen McClarty, 2012). As a result, those responsible to integrate tools and methods to make the learning environment effective need to choose among new pedagogies that are gaining popularity in order to fulfill the demands of this generation. As it is stated in the NCREL & Metiri report, our world is different, now, “teachers are serving as facilitators, exploring with their students the vast world of ideas and information.” For that reason, in today’s school it is becoming more and more notorious to adapt methodologies such as: competency based learning, personalized learning, universal design of learning, problem/project based learning, and gamification, to mention a few. As a result, in the second decade of the 21st century, the instructor has a number of challenges to design and implement his/her online Spanish course having in consideration the learning outcomes of the course and the interaction between the instructor and the student in a fully online environment. It is undeniable that the effectiveness of the presence of the instructor as the guide and facilitator is important for the performance of the students no matter how the course is delivered. In this regard, media and technology are tools or means to deliver the content. Furthermore, the educator needs to consider teaching/learning as a process in which the students and the educator are active participants, so that the “classroom” environment has to be seen as a community that goes beyond the brick and mortar. In short, this presentation will cover the importance of the educator who needs to put emphasis in three elements when designing and implementing a rigorous and effective online Spanish course: 1) the process of teaching and learning must be student-driven; 2) S/he needs to create and design opportunities to facilitate learning, and 3) in teaching a second language, the instructor needs to be resourceful and have a clear idea that technology is a tool to accomplish the linguistic competence and the cultural objectives of the course through tasks.

Keywords:

Teaching Spanish as a Second Language Fully Online