Abstract:

The article presents the new author’s experimental project of wiki LMS-based course at master’ s level in Applied linguistics at the University. It was planned from the very beginning as collaborative, autonomous, instructor-led and blended, combining online, in-class and after class communication between the teacher and the students.

The project was hosted by PBworks.com and was designed from the ground collaboratively with the students - participants. The article describes this case details: the aim of the course, main design features ( how to build the content), general instruction principles and includes students’ roles and achievements. All supported with the authentic screenshots from the wiki site.

The new thing about the pedagogical strategy is that the syllabus, content and materials, assignments and grading were conceived only within the blended model and developed gradually along with the course running ( in the process of the course implementation). In this case, students-participants were active not only for this course completion but they were involved in its content, resources and materials load. They were also asked to offer creative ideas for syllabus design and even to take initiative in the course instruction ( through the forum and commenting).

As a result, we could identify this Model’s trend in coming out from the students- centered approach to students partnership collaborative focus. There is a limitation here for involving selected students at master’s level of higher education as they have to be mature and educated enough to co-work with the instructor. Anyway, we consider necessary to introduce some students’ co-teaching and co-partnering activities in the early stages of higher education at bachelor’s level. The model motivates learners, accelerates and enhances skills and knowledge acquisition compared to the traditional student-centered blended concept.

The second part of the article demonstrates some practical examples of how to teach and develop student’s research skills during the subject course, how to combine their individual projects with group collaboration to quickly achieve best results in both subject learning and research skills development. The samples of original screenshots from the site provide examples of such tasks and students' projects.

To sum up, the blended collaborative educational approach could be transformed into complex skills and knowledge acquisition during a subject course. Now it could be regarded as a norm. It is possible to integrate research methods teaching into such a course. It is possible to turn the blended course from student-centered to student co-partnership and even student co-authorship at any stage of the model: design, implementation, instruction, feedback. Though, the model requires further development and experiments.

The article could be useful for blended learning practitioners, researchers, linguists and translators, and experiences teachers and developers of distance and blended courses.

Keywords:

Blended learning, wiki, course design and instruction, linguistics, translation studies, education, collaborative.