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Slides
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Slides are documents intended to support the Electronic
Classroom, before, during and after the sessions.
The
Electronic
Classroom
is not only a special form of chat room controled by the trainer.
It is also the occasion to examine resources
that will contribute to building understanding of a subject
and furthering research into it. It contains a feature available
to the trainer only: a button labelled Slides that
enables the trainer to send to each learner's screen the electronic
documents chosen to support the course. These can be URLs
on the World Wide Web or documents prepared by the trainer
and uploaded previously to the learners' work stations.
The slides can also be made available for consultation
before (or after) the Electronic Classroom session by posting
them within the course itself. In the Control Panel there
is a button that allows the trainer to create the links to
slides and the learner to consult them.
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Role
Play
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ClassLeader allows the trainer to prepare Role Play
activities for language learning.
For certain courses, such as foreign language courses, where
the learner needs to build up practice of speaking in realistic
contexts, ClassLeader contains an extension that makes
it possible for the learner to practice complete two-character
dialogues based on recorded sentences. The learner follows
four phases of work and can produce a complete dialogue with
recordings that can be uploaded to the server for consultation
by the trainer.
The trainer can prepare every aspect of these dialogues or
use existing recordings. This function requires a particular
configuration of each learner's machine.
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Role
simulation
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Role simulation is a complex pedagogic procedure easy
to implement through ClassLeader and allowing learners
to develop rich learning experiences.
Role
Simulation is a pedagogic procedure adapted to the learning
complex skills, and particularly those that involve inter-personal
behavior. The basic principle is to assign complementary roles
to pairs or small groups of learners, who must then enter
into one or several forms of interaction
to produce a result (exchange of information, conversation,
production of a document in common). The obvious example is
learning to negotiate. One in a pair of learner's would be
offering a service or product for which the other would be
the client. The role simulation might end with a session of
the electronic
classroom
dedicated to the critical assessment of the contracts produced
by pairs of learners.
Role simulation, in this sense, can be combined with a problem
solving approach to learning to stimulate learner research,
communication and expression: three skills that are essential
to successful learning, whatever the subject. It also implies
sharing and testing of newly acquired knowledge amongst learners
themselves.
ClassLeader has been designed to facilitate role simulation.
The trainer can prepare and store the individual assignments
that will trigger the role play and communicate them to the
learner at the appropriate time. Learners can contact each
other through the e-mail function in ClassLeader. They
can also exchange points of view directly or even negotiate
in private sessions of the electronic classroom. Of course,
they may want to use other means, such as the telephone or
face to face meetings (when possible) to complete their simulations.
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Technology
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ClassLeader harnesses the power of technology
to promote the best possible pedagogy.
Although
ClassLeader is meant to facilitate technology-based
learning, its aim is not to promote technology itself, but
to facilitate better learning through the integration of technology
into well designed pedagogic programs. The technology involved
belongs to three families: telecommunication, information
technology and multimedia. Network-based telecommunications
allow people involved in the pedagogic process (trainers and
learners) to establish and maintain contact in spite of physical
variations such as distance and time (scheduling and availability).
Information technology (computers) allows the training
process to be structured, rendered interactive and the data
it produces stored for optimal use. Multimedia allows
the integration of complex objects into the learning curriculum.
To be effective, technology-based pedagogy must be easy to
use and not require any particular technological skills, any
more than driving a car requires detailed knowledge of automotive
mechanics or an understanding of the principle of internal
combustion. ClassLeader obviously requires the ability
to use a PC and an IP network (Internet, Intranet), but is
designed to work principally through simple access to basic
functionalities from a graphic Control
Panel with clearly labeled buttons.
As computing and the Internet are becoming standard features
of our daily lives, in the same way the automobile and television
did in the 20th century, the technology will increasingly
be seen as a necessary means of implementing pedagogic
procedures alongside other more traditional ones.
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Tests
and exercises
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Tests and exercises are an optional complement to
the contents of any lesson and can include multimedia.
Within every lesson
or work phase, the trainer can include exercises
or tests. These can be designed to reinforce the
contents of the lesson. The procedures available vary from
simple multiple choice to free text. In our pedagogic terminology,
an exercise is an activity meant to stimulate reflection
and research; a test is an instrument to measure knowledge
supposed already acquired. In most cases, even the tests
should be designed by the trainer as self-tests rather than
formal examinations: their principal aim should be to give
learners an idea of their level of performance at a given
moment or help them to understand whether they have successfully
completed a phase of work before going on to the next. Nevertheless,
the results are available for consultation by the trainer.
They can be used by the trainer for refining the pedagogic
dialogue with the learner.
Tests
and exercises may be easily created from simple text or
may integrate images, video or sound files by indicating
the address of the files on a server or local machine. ClassLeader
thus offers the option of including multimedia objects within
each question of the exercises or tests, and even of building
the questions out of the multimedia. This means, for example,
that a question in an exercise or test may exist only as
audio or video, or it may be both audio and text. The trainer
has the leeway to mix text and media in various combinations.
A trainer who has learned how to store multimedia objects
on a server or upload
them to each learner's machines can thus prepare questions
that include images, video or sound.
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Trainer
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ClassLeader uses the term trainer to designate
the person who exercises general responsibility for achieving
pedagogic goals with a variety of means.
In
ClassLeader the lead actor is the trainer. We have
chosen the term trainer although his or her central
responsibility is concerned more with making learning happen
than with training or instructing in the traditional sense.
It might be considered more appropriate to propose the title
facilitator, but even this would represent only a small
part of the trainer's functions. The principal actions of
the trainer are planning, creating, initiating, facilitating,
following up, checking, providing feedback, organizing and
evaluating. This range of activities points to the obvious
difference between this kind of distance learning and traditional
teaching or training. The trainer nevertheless has the power
to instruct, to initiate activities that aim at developing
specific skills (the original meaning of training). The difference
is that there is a larger variety of means available to meet
those goals. The trainer can thus mobilize more resources
than in the traditional classroom to respond to both collective
and individual needs.
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Training
culture
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ClassLeader requires a change of attitude towards
training that implies a new training culture.
A fully productive use of ClassLeader implies the
existence of a training culture that encourages the transfer
of responsibility towards the learner and the capacity to
manage the consequences of that transfer. It is less a question
of acceptance of technology,
which is nevertheless part of the cultural shift in training
to which ClassLeader belongs, than the conviction
that learning can take place efficiently outside of the
controlling presence of the trainer and that lessons can
be developed and delivered elsewhere than the lecture hall
or classroom and by other means.
To
be effective, ClassLeader should be used in an environment
where there is a commitment to a new style of training.
The trainer should make sure, in the first phase of work
with a new group, that the principles of distance training
are well understood and should make the effort to communicate
any particular objectives and methodological considerations
that will be necessary for effective work.
Because ClassLeader is much more than a set of techniques
to facilitate online training, a full understanding of what
it allows trainers, learners and the institutions they belong
to, to accomplish, is essential to achieving long term success.
That understanding will best occur in environments where
the advantages of a more varied and personalized form of
training are understood. As this is very different from
traditional training cultures, where everything was based
on a standard and monolithic delivery of content, restricted
practical work and simple techniques for testing acquisition
of input, it is fair to speak of a cultural revolution
in training comparable in its effects on behavior and organization
to the industrial revolution or the digital revolution in
our economy.
The constructivist
pedagogy that can be used with ClassLeader and which
is part of this revolution is not new. It has been elaborated
by conscientious pedagogues for centuries, but has never
been applied on a wide scale because the teaching and training
environments and their organization have rarely been sufficiently
propitious. A case could be made that ClassLeader
permits the generalization of the tutorial system
which is the foundation of undergraduate studies at Oxford
and Cambridge: personalized instruction complemented by
heavy doses of learner initiative and the availability of
a rich variety of resources. ClassLeader has built
from this model and yet goes beyond it by integrating the
group into the communication system.
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Training
needs
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The notion of training needs can be redefined in the
light of the new pedagogic potential offered by ClassLeader.
Assessing
training needs means first of all determining what those needs
are, or rather what they might be. The analysis of needs often
skips over this first vital step and simply repeats a definition
of largely pragmatic needs as formulated in the past. When
using ClassLeader we propose to take into account each
of the dimension of need that can actually be handled through
active pedagogic processes. Theses are both traditional and
new:
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the
need to acquire new knowledge (traditional), |
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the
need to adjust to a new physical environment (traditional),
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the
need to develop skills through specific practice (traditional),
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the
need to acquire experience (new, in that traditional
pedagogy supposed that this would happen after the phase
of training), |
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the
need to refine and develop one's discursive skills,
relevant to all fields of training (new), |
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the
need to learn how to adjust to changing conditions of
practice: technological evolution, new techniques and
methods, new trends of discourse (new), |
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the
need to adapt one's personality and social identity
to the fact of mastering new sets of skills and new
bodies of knowledge (a fundamental factor in developing
and maintaining motivation, but largely neglected in
traditional pedagogy - new). |
When the pedagogic approach that can be created in the learning
environment allows trainers to take into acount all these
factors, training needs can be redefined more comprehensively.
When needs are thus reformulated, training objectives are
better perceived, the means required more easily identified
and the results correctly evaluated.
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Upload
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The upload function makes it possible for the trainer
to install vital resources on each learner's machine.
The
upload function allows trainers to prepare pedagogic resources
that will be transferred automatically by the upload process
to the learner's computer. This makes it possible to reduce
online time and factors of disturbance related to network
use.
Learners can thus automatically receive resources they need,
but they can also upload documents that they themselves
have prepared. An example of this is the facility for the
automatic creation of voice recordings within Role
Play activities for language learning.
End
of Terms & definitions
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