5 EdTech Mistakes to Avoid When Moving Your Language Course Online

5 common mistakes for educators and administrators to avoid to create the best online language learning experience for students.

Many universities and other organizations have needed to move their live lessons online, thanks to Covid-19. Some haven’t been fully prepared to do so. Hopefully, these five points below will help you to think carefully through some of the challenges if you’re taking this exciting step.

When you look for EdTech solutions to improve your students’ learning experience, there are several key points to remember and mistakes to avoid. If you get these wrong, you can make students demotivated, or even hostile. This can negatively affect their learning and damage your organization’s reputation.

Here are five key mistakes to avoid:

1. You focus on technology for its own sake.

Many new tools have revolutionized learning for both adults and children, but often, for marketing reasons, courses may focus too much on showing off these exciting new features.

These could include:

• new hardware,
• more interactive activities,
• point-scoring,
• sharing on social media,
• virtual (VR) or augmented reality (AR),
• and many other tools.

Many of these features are designed to make the learning experience more fun and feel more like playing a game.

So are these new tools really a bad thing?

Perhaps the better question to ask is: how exactly does this new technology help students and teachers achieve the course aims better than before?

Does it provide new opportunities?

All of these tools have the potential to greatly impact students’ learning experience, but only if they’re used in the right way. They may also simply be distractions, as none of them is automatically an educational solution.

For example, in a language course, when students see matching words in two columns click into place to make a phrase, it might look good, but is it effective?

If the activity isn’t challenging enough for those learners, or they don’t understand why the two words match to begin with, all the graphics and sound effects won’t make a difference.

Or perhaps there is a cute animated assistant on-screen to help a student. This could be a nice touch to make students smile, but if the course doesn’t show them what they’ve learned, those extra features are wasted.

It’s all about priorities.

This problem is a lot like a special effects movie that doesn’t have enough of a story. Again and again this mistake is made, and usually (with a few exceptions) those movies suffer at the box office and get bad reviews. People will always want a good story, regardless of the technology.

Using technology in education isn’t important only for developers of bestselling apps and popular websites. It’s relevant for every educator and business owner working in EdTech today. To make the most of the new opportunities, it’s good to understand the limitations of any technology in education.

For example, video has many benefits and is hugely popular. But for students, sitting through hour-long video lectures can be more demanding and less engaging than equally long offline ones. However, some studies show that there are students who prefer the learning atmosphere of a video lesson to an offline one. Each has its pros and cons. Ideally, for the content to be memorable, videos being used for input should be short.

Use common platforms such as YouTube very carefully, as they can be distracting for students.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that these tools can’t also be very useful. An online course can be both fun and effective. But you should introduce tools carefully and take advantage of their strengths, rather than just using them as a substitute for other methods.

Plan carefully for how you move your content online. Your strategy may include changing how the material is structured (e.g. into smaller chunks) or how it is designed, by using more visual aids, etc.

Most students, whatever their age, will want a positive learning experience. They will hope that the technology makes the lesson fun and helps them learn more easily, not with more difficulty.

Self-motivated students will always ask themselves if your course helped them. Even if you don’t ask them the question directly, you can be sure they will think about it.

2. You don’t plan for students with limited access to wi-fi or other technology

One of the biggest challenges facing educators moving to online teaching platforms during Covid-19 has been supporting students with inconsistent or limited access to technology. This could be because they don’t have a specific device or have limited access to wi-fi.

If you design your course to be delivered completely online, it will exclude those students, or limit what they can achieve from the course.

Not only has this challenge highlighted issues of inequality in some areas, but also raised questions about relying too much on online systems. This is a serious challenge, especially for companies who want to make the most of new technology.

Some organizations have developed creative solutions to not leave any student behind in the learning process. These strategies take advantage of both online and offline resources. They benefit from both the old and the new while also overcoming their limitations.

Some strategies that you might consider include:

• asking students to map and catalogue available resources
• getting students to work together to think of ways to perform activities offline
• arranging delayed feedback sessions, where students work through materials when they have access, over a few days

These strategies also let students work at their own pace. They can focus on what’s most important for them, interacting or not interacting with each other as needed.

Naturally, this has its own challenges too. These include students losing focus from delayed feedback, or having different needs. All these approaches require teachers and instructors to be flexible. On the other hand, this could also offer you more freedom with your own organization’s teaching schedules.

When you have students in different locations, you can use delayed lessons and feedback sessions.

You can also encourage community sharing with moderation from a teacher in:

• a group chat on a messaging app,
• a discussion in an online forum,
• a dedicated social media group.

If you are a teacher or trainer and are recording a live class with a camera to share with students, remember to check the camera placement carefully. Make sure that whatever you show on the screen is easy for students to read, and that your own voice is clear and audible.

Online video conferencing services, such as Zoom, can help solve this problem with screen-sharing, but these services also come with their own challenges.

Always have several options for how you share these recordings. Don’t depend on one app or service, and have a solution for those students who are unable to be online all the time.

3. Your course content isn’t relevant and applicable to your students

The relevance of any course content to students is important whether online or offline. Always design it for a specific audience, rather than simply covering the necessary information. This usually won’t be very engaging to students and will be less effective as a result.

Even when a government institution has stated what needs to be in your course, you should still design it with the students’ age, gender, cultural background, etc. in mind.

This is even more noticeable to students in online content, as out of date references and attitudes are usually obvious to them. As you move your course online, it can be a great opportunity to fix these issues this and to update any outdated or irrelevant content.

For example, in an activity in a language course, the situations, challenges, ethnicity and gender of the characters and their roles should all reflect the target students’ lives and aspirations. This is essential to get students to believe in a course, and to identify with characters and situations.

If not, this will be a missed opportunity at best, and at worst a turn off for them, as it doesn’t match their experience of the world both offline and online. Perhaps they will look to another course to fulfil that need.

If the students have diverse needs, ideally you should adapt the materials to suit their needs.

Two common ways to do this are to:

• Change details to reflect that diversity and match their experience of the world (e.g. include local references, avoid sensitive topics, include activities they would do, etc.).
• Create several slightly different versions of materials, each suited to a particular group.

Whichever approach you follow, your materials should be relevant to your students. Find out by asking them, in surveys or focus groups, or be checking what your successful competitors are doing.

4. Your course is too challenging or not challenging enough

This applies to both online and offline courses, and is important for both the whole course and individual lessons.

If you have the resources, you should always do market research to understand what students expect, what they want, and what they don’t want. Even if you run a non-profit organization, when you move a course online, this becomes even more important.

If your course is either too difficult or not difficult enough, students will lose interest and become disengaged. Your teachers will have a constant challenge, and all the latest technology in the world won’t solve the problem.

If the course is too patronizing, students will likely also lose interest. Remember to be clear about the limits of your course, and what students can expect when they complete it. This should be clear to them for each lesson as well as for the course as a whole.

If an activity or a lesson feels too short to a student, it may be because it wasn’t complex enough. How long an activity takes online and offline may be different. When you adapt activities to use online, a tool like ‘Bloom’s taxonomy’ can be helpful. This is a popular task design model that can guide you how to make tasks more or less challenging.

Online courses tend to have a high dropout rate. When a student is forced to attend a course for whatever reason, there is the good chance that they become disengaged.

One way you can make a course less challenging is by restructuring it into small units. Many successful apps and online learning platforms do this already, with larger modules divided into smaller units.

Each of these could start with a short 3–5 minute-long video or audio clip, followed by an activity for students to complete alone or with a partner. This sort of modular structure already exists in most textbooks, but for online courses the individual units usually need to be even smaller.

These smaller units reflect how students consume most other media, especially on their phones. You can usually break down lectures or complex materials that need detailed explanations into smaller, more digestible chunks. These will work better online than an unbroken input stream.

Fortunately, there are already many tools for creating these small units and building an online course. Depending on your needs, you may want to use an existing platform for your course, such as Teachable or Kajabi, or to create your own, using anything from older presentation tools such as PowerPoint, Keynote or Prezi, to more interactive ones such as Wordpress, Wix, or Articulate Storyline. Great courses have been made using all of these.

The one you choose will depend on answers to questions such as:

• What is the course content?
• Is it for self-study or should an instructor be present?
• How much media is needed?
• Should tests be included?
• How easy is it to update or to share?
• What are the hardware and software requirements?

Whichever platform you choose, be sure that it allows you to present your content at the right level of challenge for your students.

5. Your course doesn’t give students enough feedback or sense of progress

Unfortunately, just because students have attended lessons and completed a course doesn’t always mean they have made progress.

Design your tests carefully to be valid and to measure real progress. If students are too young to expect this themselves, the expectation usually passes to their parents. Any feedback they receive should be meaningful and actionable.

When you acquire almost any skill, small gains are motivating. They are also less stressful for students, especially when they are struggling to stay engaged and motivated.

For this reason, your activities and lessons should be brief and specific, with clear measurable outcomes. This is especially important if in the past your course has used longer lessons. For it to work online and for feedback to be useful, specific goals work best.

EdTech companies that provide self-study apps for students to use on their own time (such as Duolingo) usually follow this approach anyway.

If you’re able to include it in your course, there is no substitute for individual human feedback. In the commercial EdTech world, this can be a deciding factor for why students choose one product over another very similar one.

Some effective feedback systems have been developed for error correction in language learning courses on writing, speaking, listening and reading. These are often based on multiple choice test answers. But automated feedback can never have the empathy and personal touch of another human being.

In the early stages of a course, correction is the often most simple and therefore the easiest to automate. But it is also at this stage when students are least confident and need the most encouragement. If your resources allow it, perhaps human and automated feedback could be balanced in different parts of your course, depending on students’ needs.

Summary

These are five common challenges faced by many organizations looking for EdTech solutions. The answer to these challenges is that the focus should always be the same as that of any great product or service: students should have a good user experience, and should get what they paid for.

Here they are again, along with some possible solutions:

1. Always use technology to better achieve the learning aims, never for its own sake.
2. Plan ahead for how to include students who may not always have online access.
3. Make sure your course reflects the real needs of your students, based on their identities and experiences.
4. Design and present your course content at the right level for your students — it should be neither too easy nor too challenging.
5. Give students regular and useful feedback, and keep them motivated.

I hope some of those tips are helpful, and that you have great success and enjoyment in moving your course online!

You can find me at www.carewfreelance.com