Ever wanted to control the number of times a learner can listen to a recording in a listening test? Well, I’ve seen this request a number of times on Moodle.org’s forums recently and not so recently. So I’ve decided to develop and share this Flash MP3 player for tests.

What does it do?

It streams (progressive download) and plays a single MP3 (or AAC) audio file once. It has no play back controls whatsoever so there is no way for a learner to listen to the recording again except by refreshing the web page in the browser. There is an optional parameter that sets the number of times the MP3 file plays.

What is it for?

It’s for deploying in listening tests or activities where it’s necessary or desirable to limit the number of times a learner can listen to an audio recording. For example, Cambridge ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) listening tests require that the learner only listen to each recording twice so it’s particularly useful in practice exercises for learners who are preparing to take one of these exams.

How can I use it?

Detailed instructions are included in the download package as well as some example embed code. Unfortunately, I can’t provide any easy to use plugins or modules for LMSs (Learning Management Systems) – It’s too complicated to explain here and now. For now, this Flash application can only be deployed by manually inserting the necessary embed code and editing some of the parameters. I’ve included some code examples and explanations for how to embed it in Moodle from the course files directory (moodledata).  This should present no problems at all for an experienced web designer or web developer and an IT savvy teacher or course content designer could probably deploy it successfully by copying and editing the embed code examples provided.

Do I need to buy a licence to use it?

No, this project is open source and completely free. You can copy it, change it and redistribute it in any way you like. The only condition is that you must leave my name and copyright on it and distribute a copy of the GPL open source licence with it. The Flash CS4 FLA and ActionScript 3.0 source files and full details are included in the download package.

How secure is it?

It’s worth noting that this MP3 player for tests is not secure. An IT savvy learner could easily look at the source code for the web page and see the URL of the MP3 file being played and download it directly. The very popular Firefox web browser also has a number of plugins that makes it very easy to download media files from virtually any source no matter how well they are protected, even streams from media servers that are supposed to be very secure. The easiest way to make it more difficult to cheat is to put a time limit on the listening test itself. That way, there isn’t enough time to listen more than once.

Update:

I’ve moved the MP3 Player for Tests to Google Code to make it more accessible to developers and easier to find and download. You can find the [http://code.google.com/p/moodle-mp3-player-for-tests/ project page here].

In this article, I’m going to discuss the relevance of social networking to learners of English, some of the developments in learning English as a foreign/second language on-line and how this might shape the future of e-learning and learning management systems for EFL/ESL.

So much to learn, so little time to learn it.

For learners studying English in their own country, it is often difficult or inconvenient for them to get enough exposure to and practice with English. Classroom time with small groups (i.e. twelve learners or less) with a native speaker tutor who can give guidance on what constitutes “authentic” English at schools, colleges, universities and academies in most countries is at a premium and most only provide between two and four hours per week, although in some cases this can be as high as six. In my opinion, between two and four hours of small group classes per week is not adequate for students to learn the language and develop the communication skills they need.

The majority of EFL/ESL coursebooks include workbooks that provide further written grammar, vocabulary, reading and sometimes even listening activities for learners to do outside the classroom in their own time. Also, tutors often encourage or require learners to read, listen to English radio programmes, watch English films and TV shows, keep diaries, etc. These are typically solitary activities that place the emphasis more on passive understanding or grammatical understanding of language than on active production and communication skills.

Using the Internet as a learning resource.

Growing numbers of learners are now taking the initiative for themselves and using Web 2.0 technology to practise their English. As well as passive comprehension practice such as watching videos on YouTube, listening to English language radio stations such as BBC Radio 4 and BBC Learning English.com, reading on-line magazines and news sites, learners now have an assortment of social networking sites to choose from where they can get in touch with other people with similar learning interests to their own. Currently, there is a bit of a “land grab” going on as small start-up companies such as Babbel and Live Mocha create social networking sites especially for EFL/ESL learners. Currently, learners can keep in touch with each other through instant messaging (chat), bulletin boards (forums), VoIP (Internet telephony) and, of course, video conferencing and shared on-line whiteboards.

How do social networking sites affect learning management systems?

Quite rightly, EFL/ESL learners just want to “get on with it” with what they already know. Many have already spent a considerable amount of time exploring and learning how to use the software applications on social networking sites for activities such as instant messaging, bulletin boards, VoIP calls and video conferencing. Personally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to insist that learners learn to use yet more, often poorly designed, social networking application interfaces. So why not just let them use the ones they already know?

There’s a wide variety of software and services available and often the most widely used and known ones are free. Google and Yahoo! are popular and particularly good at supporting open protocols and open source (i.e. free and adaptable) software. It’s much cheaper and easier to use 3rd party web services provided by Google, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN Messenger and Skype because they have established networks that have been developed by highly skilled and talented teams of developers over several years.  The really hard work has already been done for us so we get the benefits of reduced development time, huge, stable, well maintained and powerful networks, well documented APIs and public support forums for both developers and users. Having all this available for free has brought the cost of creating and running social networking platforms for e-learning effectively, within the reach of even small schools and academies.

So, allowing learners to stick with their favourite social networking applications and services and integrating these with learning management systems effectively kills two birds with one stone:

#1 – Learners are already well-versed in using the software and so are more likely to engage with their classmates on-line,

#2 – The most costly parts of developing, maintaining and improving the services are expertly taken care of for free.

Keep up or fall behind

I think that in the near future, LMSs will have to incorporate and integrate more 3rd party social networking services or risk becoming irrelevant to EFL/ESL learners as they migrate to social networking sites for their communicative language practice. I’m sure that many learners will welcome the opportunity to link their own personal social networking spaces within LMSs so that they can share their blogs, comments, etc. with their classmates. They’ll also have the added benefits of having all their applications available from a single website, i.e. their school’s learning management system, and developing their English communication skills with topics and ideas that are genuinely relevant to them in a safe environment with people they already know and see in class on a regular basis.

E-learning resources have a number of advantages over book and paper based resources. In this article, I’m going to write about one in particular: the importance of being able to edit the resources that you use with learners. This article focuses directly on resources for learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) as they provide very clear examples of why it is important.

Why would you want to edit learning resources?

Apart from obvious reasons, such as changes to the syllabus, correcting typos, correcting wrong answers and other such errors, it’s a great advantage to be able to edit resources to bring them into line with other resources to create more coherent, better targeted courses.

Frequently, e-learning resources are used in combination with classroom, task-based and other types of learning activities, otherwise known as blended learning. Under these circumstances, it’s desirable to limit the scope of what learners are exposed to in order to help them focus on the core curriculum. In the case of EFL/ESL lessons, you’ll most probably have more success presenting and practising the same 8-12 new words and expressions in the classroom and on-line than if you present one set of vocabulary in class and another, different set on-line.

Good resources, inappropriate content

There are plenty of very good and very effective photocopiable resources and self-study materials for EFL/ESL learners to learn and practise with. The difficulty arises when we try to construct a coherent, well focused lesson or course with a core syllabus using these resources. For example, if a lesson covers comparative and superlative adjectives and transport and travel vocabulary but the photocopiable resources for adjectives cover lifestyle vocabulary, and the resources for transport and travel vocabulary cover the Present Perfect, then we’ve just doubled the amount of new language being simultaneously presented and practised. For many students, having to grapple with two lexical areas of vocabulary and two areas of structure and use at the same time can be overwhelming and confusing.

Lesson objectives: Grammar = comparative & superlative adjectives, Vocabulary = transport & travel

• Resource #1: Grammar = comparative & superlative adjectives, Vocabulary = lifestyle & leisure
• Resource #2: Grammar = Present Perfect simple, Vocabulary = transport & travel

Inconsistencies across different resources

Futhermore, for any language that we expect the learner to remember and use correctly, a certain amount of practice and repetition is necessary so we need a series of different types of activity to recycle the target language. Photocopiable resources and self-study materials tend to cover each language point once, therefore  learners usually need more resources from other sources. If we use a photocopiable resource in one instance to learn and practise vocabulary in a particular lexical area, such as transport and travel for Intermediate students, the specific vocabulary can vary from resource to resource since photocopiable resource authors often have different ideas about what the vocabulary for a particular lexical area for a particular level of English should be. This can result in learners being expected to learn more new vocabulary than is reasonable in a given length of time.

If we were to add yet more resources, the amount of language presented quickly becomes unmanageable. Currently, a lot of teachers spend a lot of time adapting or rewriting resources because they are inappropriate for the language points that they are teaching.

How does e-learning have an advantage over other resources?

Books and worksheets, our most familiar learning resources, are published in what’s known as hard copy, in other words, on paper. Unless we get heavily involved with Tippex, scissors, tape and glue, these resources are essentially uneditable. E-learning resources differ from this in that they are stored electronically and can be easily copied and edited, so having your texts and pictures in MS Word or Open Office Writer documents means that you can copy and paste any of them into a new resource and edit them and publish them as necessary. With Google Docs you have the added bonus of having the resources available in one easily accessible place.

To avoid copyright infringement issues, I recommend only using your own original content or Creative Commons content (Wikipedia, Flickr, Wikimedia, etc.) for this and properly acknowledging all authors and contributors.

Data driven learning resources and learning interactions

Electronic documents are somewhat more convenient than hard copy resources but, of course, computers and software are capable of making our lives much easier by generating learning resources that are multimedia and interactive and hosting them on the Internet where learners can have access to them anytime and from anywhere they have an Internet connection. Here, I’m talking about dynamic learning resources supported by learning management systems.

Dynamic simply means that the resources are generated by software automatically so all we need is the resource content, i.e. text, questions, answers, images, audio and sometimes video, in an appropriate format. An e-learning application, usually Flash or Java based, can read the learning resource content and create a unique learning resource. In the world of e-learning this is called a learning interaction. A learning interaction can be as simple as a page of text and images or it can be a highly interactive grammar game or self-correcting dictation.

So we have:

learning resource content (data) + e-learning application (software) = learning interaction (resource)

The beauty of this “data-driven” model is that we only have to author the learning resource content once. After that, we can use it, dynamically (i.e. automatically) to create any number of different learning interactions. All we have to do is substitute different e-learning applications that can read the learning resource content. E-learning applications can be word searches, dictations, multiple matching, multiple choice, true or false, short answer, gap-fill, written answer dialogues, spoken answer dialogues, listening activities, shadow reading activities, subtitled video, tests, etc. From just one set of learning resource content, it’s possible to create any number of learning interactions that focus on developing learners’ skills and knowledge. An added advantage of this model is that it encourages learning resource designers to recycle language more frequently thereby ensuring that learners get adequate practice. You can see an example of this on the demo course on my learning management system (login as a guest). On the demo course, the learning interactions “Word Search”, “Listen and Select” and “Look and Describe” all share the same learning content. If we edit the learning content, the changes are immediately reflected in all the learning interactions. We can also create a new set of learning content by copying and the original set and editing it to suit another purpose. Again, with this new set of learning content, we can dynamically create any number of different learning interactions.

This idea of keeping learning content and learning applications separate and combining them to create learning interactions can reduce course content development time dramatically. With a relatively small library of learning applications and learning content, it’s possible to provide hours of effective, engaging, varied, high-quality learning interactions in a very short space of time. It’s also very easy to copy and edit entire courses to re-purpose the learning content. So here we have an easy way to create lots of appropriate, well targeted and effective e-learning resources!

A quick note about SCORM

The Shareable Content Object Reference Model is an e-learning standard initially commissioned by the US military in 1999. It’s very different to dynamically driven e-learning resources. It’s not easily editable as it requires each learning interaction to be a self-contained package, i.e. they don’t share the same source of learning content, so in order to edit the learning content of a set of interactions, it’s necessary to edit and re-author all the interactions individually which is quite a complicated and involved task. I wrote an earlier article about the pros and cons of SCORM on this blog.

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http://eflstories.wordpress.com/

Dictations are a very difficult activity to get right. Traditional computer based dictations are usually a quite awkward, unhelpful and ultimately frustrating experience to say the least. The idea of this learning application is for it to be more of an enjoyable exploratory, learning activity than a listening test. So far it has been my most popular activity among learner test groups.

Listen First

Learners first listen to the entire audio recording. The recording in reality is a collection of recordings of individual sentences that the Flash learning application plays in sequence. The learning application is dynamic, which means it automatically loads all the text and audio that it needs and creates the learning interaction. No programming is necessary. If you change the text and audio, or if you want to display it in a larger or smaller area, the learning application adjusts automatically.

Learners listen to the entire recording once as a preamble. Then he/she can listen to each sentence of the recording individually by clicking on the blue play buttons at the start of each sentence and type in the words.

Individual sentences and time-stretched audio

Next to the play buttons are “time-stretched” buttons. These play alternative recordings which have been time-stretched. Time-stretching is a sophisticated process by which a sound is lengthened or slowed down without altering the pitch. It makes rapid speech slower and therefore easier to understand. It’s a natural way for learners to get used to hearing and understanding connected speech.

Interactive text input

As learners type, the letters are immediately colour coded red, amber and green, giving intuitive feedback and encouragement to keep trying. As words are successfully completed, they are ‘locked down’ so that the learner is unable to accidentally change the completed words to incorrect ones.

You can try out the Flash interactive dictation activity by logging in to my Learning Management System . Select “Login as a guest”. Please feel free to post a comment or ask a question below.