Activity 1 - Virtual Courses: Analysing General Aspects of a Virtual Course

The aim of this activity was to evaluate general aspects of a virtual course. Here is the link to the pdf: http://moo.uab.cat/file.php/3784/Learning_to_learn.pdf

As we all know, Foreign Languages are too complex and varied for students to learn all they need in a classroom. Therefore, students need to be encouraged to develop their own learning strategies and become autonomous learners. An example of this is found in Module 1. It aims to introduce students in the area of self-learning as well as in the field of Internet.

Several issues must be taken into account when talking about autonomous learning. First of all, I think that one of the most important issues when trying to be an autonomous learner is to become an active learner rather than the recipient of any learning action, because motivation is maintained or even increased in students. In relation to this, Module 1 is full of examples of practice tasks (e.g. an introduction to the Virtual Campus, Learning to use the Internet) and classroom discussions (e.g. What is online learning? The Internet and language learning) so that students can practise and learn on their own.

Secondly, I think that attitudes to self-learning are usually conditioned by the students’ environment, culture, friends and so on. In Module 1, I guess that most of the students are adults who learn English for specific purposes (i.e. their aim is to learn English through the Web) and, consequently, they may all have the same interests. Moreover, students are not all the same and, hence, some of them find more useful to study on their own rather than being encouraged by a teacher. Depending on this issue, self-learning will vary. I believe, nonetheless, that those students who try to be autonomous learners will keep on studying after any course they might be attending (e.g. in this specific case, the subject about English for Academic Purposes: Learning English through the Web).

Finally, the essential goal of autonomous learning is how to promote autonomy to the students, that is to say, how to teach them the importance of being autonomous learners. In Module 1, any activity (i.e. activity 7 page 39) describes objectives, tasks, language level, any previous knowledge, related activities, etc., in order to catch the students’ attention. This description is not done randomly, but I suppose that this division might increase the students’ awareness of how to classify objectives, how to look for sources and how to relate new activities to previous knowledge. However, I think the biggest problem in the current educational system is that most of the teachers do not give the “adequate” tools to the students so as they can become autonomous. It is this approach that should be changed.