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.

Another revolution in the way we communicate and interact with each other on the web. Google may have done it yet again. Introducing… Google Wave!

What is it?

It’s difficult to explain. The Google developers’ way of describing it is to ask the question, “What would e-mail look like if it were invented today?” It’s probably easier to think of it as combining all the different ways we use to communicate and interact with each other on the Internet. Think of users who have e-mail, Facebook or LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Blogger or WordPress, Twitter, chat and forum  accounts. It’s an ambitious project as it looks like they want it to replace e-mail. That’ll take some doing.

Why create yet another social networking tool?

E-mail, Facebook or LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Blogger or WordPress, Twitter, chat and forums are all great ways to communicate and keep in touch with individuals and groups but they’re all separate and distinct and everyone has their own preferences for different service providers. E-mail is probably the most popular and widely used because accounts allow users to interact with users on other networks. For example, if you have a Yahoo! account, you can send and receive e-mails not only from other Yahoo! account holders but any other e-mail service providers such as Gmail or Hotmail or even to and from your own e-mail server. While e-mail is an open standard or protocol, most other services such as Facebook and MySpace are not. You can only keep in touch with people who have accounts with the same service provider. This can result in some people feeling “badgered” by friends, colleagues and acquaintances to get yet another account on the latest Internet messaging fad.

An example of Google wave's user interface

Google Wave promises to be different or should I say, more like e-mail. It’s an open source project so anyone can set up a Wave service of their own.  It’s also a protocol, which means that like e-mail, all Wave services can talk to each other so users only have to sign up to one service provider, just like e-mail. It’s also extensible so developers can create their own customised versions and add new functions and features. So we could end up with Google Wave, Yahoo! Wave, MSN Wave,  Acme Wave, etc.

What happens when you combine all these different ways of communicating into one unified interface?

In a word, synergy. It’s difficult to predict how it will evolve. It’s up to all of us and the developer community to come up with new, interesting and useful applications of this new technology. A good analogy would be the case of Nintendo: all they did was to combine a simple games console with the motion detector from a car air-bag system and it gave us the Wii. Almost overnight it overtook the Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox to become the most successful games console ever in what was previously believed to be a saturated market. It fundamentally changed the way we interact with games consoles and the types of games that are possible.

From what I’ve seen, one of the real strengths of this project is its user interface. It’s obviously aimed at the general, non-tech savvy user. A lot of the functions are “point and click”, “click and type” and “drag and drop”, meaning that it’s pretty intuitive for anyone to participate fully in a Wave. It’s quick and easy to drag and drop links to pages, embed images or other media and have them appear instantly and automatically – no more user interface dialogue boxes. The interface is also “live” so that all participants of a Wave can see what each other are doing and typing in real time, so no more watching and waiting while others are typing their contributions.

One thing’s for sure. The developer community are very excited about Google Wave and we’ll see a lot of activity and new ideas coming out of it soon. The e-learning community is already buzzing about it too. Actually, I suspect that the Google development team gave this early preview seminar because they knew it was already creating quite a stir and was going to be made public quite soon in one way or another.

How is this relevant to e-learning?

Well, more and more learning management systems (LMS) are being built around social networking structures so that tutors and learners can interact and collaborate with each other, much the same way that they do at schools, academies and universities. At the moment, holding a webinar or on-line classroom session requires a media server, something that is not within the budget or capabilities of a lot of educational organisations. There are 3rd party services available such as Adobe Connect and Elluminate but they also come at a price.

I’ll make a bold prediction. I bet that it’s only a matter of time after Google Wave’s official public release that developers start coming up with extensions to incorporate Internet telephony (VoIP) services. Once we have that, companies that provide web conferencing services like Adobe Connect and Elluminate should be very concerned. We’ll all have free access to some very sophisticated, powerful and flexible web conferencing tools that can do all of the things that used to come with a premium price-tag. In other words, we can look forward to seeing the overall cost of live, interactive e-learning being reduced in the same way that Skype has reduced the cost of international telephone services.

Wave is open source and extensible so anyone can add new features to it

This has huge implications for learning on the web. Tutors will be freely able to hold web conferences with individuals or groups of learners where everyone is on a unified interface where they can talk, see each other, write and share text, images, graphics, animation, games, polls, surveys and questionnaires, audio and video much more quickly, flexibly and easily than even in a modern hi-tech classroom. The participants can be located anywhere in the world and the only requirement is a computer with a broadband Internet connection. Anyone will be able to start up e-learning courses and tutors and course content designers will be freer than ever to do what they really want with the tools available and worry less about getting LMS developers to make their ideas possible or worrying about how they’re going to pay for services that previously came with a premium price-tag. I think we’ll see an acceleration in the quality and quantity of e-learning appearing on the web.

How can I find out more?

Google presented Wave at a developer seminar and kindly recorded it and uploaded it to YouTube. They’re promising to make an official public release of Wave later this year. Please note, it’s an hour and twenty minutes long so make yourself and cup of tea or coffee, maybe even some popcorn, get comfortable and settle in for a long presentation.

Google Wave project home page.

Google Wave page on Wikipedia.org.

Oxford University Press is the biggest university press in the world (Cambridge University Press is the second). It publishes an impressive catalogue of EFL/ESL course books that are used is academies, schools and universities and by individuals around the globe. Over the last year or so they’ve been very busy creating a complementary set of on-line resources to accompany their course books.

What’s the big deal?

I think OUP have made a very astute move, in marketing terms, by providing these resources. As you most probably already know, there’s already a plethora of free on-line EFL/ESL resources for students and teachers on the web, some of them high quality, especially on the BBC’s Learning English website and some of them not so high quality. The major drawback of most on-line resources is that they don’t always correspond very closely to what learners are learning at any particular time – they may cover a particular grammar point but the vocabulary and context may be completely different or they might cover vocabulary but in differently organised lexical groups, for example. OUP have addressed this problem quite admirably by providing on-line resources that correspond to specific books that they publish, such as New English File, Natural English and New Headway, unit by unit, topic by topic. Now it’s a case of learners looking up the website addresses printed on their course books and finding the appropriate chapter and language point that they want to practise.

But no learner accounts or records!

However, one drawback, that I can see, is that learners can’t easily keep track of their activities or progress. They can’t even tell if they’ve already done an activity or not, unless they make a note of it somewhere and keep it for reference. I think it’s an important part of promoting learner independence for learners to have access to records of their activities and reports of their attendance and progress. It can be very motivating and useful as a self-diagnostic tool.

I can see why this is, I don’t think OUP want to commit themselves to the administration overhead of maintaining a student login and records database system. That would be a huge project that might even rival the world’s largest learning management system at the UK’s Open University which accommodates nearly 200,000 students.

They’re definitely a good idea.

Overall, I think OUP’s EFL/ESL on-line resources are a useful addition to their publications and address the growing expectation from learners that some part of their studies should incorporate e-learning, and I think other publishers are likely to follow their example.

The OUP’s on-line resources are accessible to everyone, without registration and they’re free of charge.