Online Teaching - the Very Early Days

 EFI – English for Internet

In its early days study.com went by the name English for Internet (EFI). I first discovered the site sometime early in 1997 when I was searching for ESL materials to use with my classroom based ESL groups in Adelaide, Australia. I noted that EFI was calling for ESL/EFL teachers to take classes online on a volunteer basis. As I knew little about how to teach online at that time and I saw it as a potentially rewarding professional development opportunity. I decided to take the plunge and put my name forward. David Winet responded and asked if I would be interested in taking an online listening class as my first assignment.

Visiting David in Berkeley 2003

If I knew little about online teaching, I knew even less about how to use audio on the Internet. However, David was persuasive and I agreed to try it. What followed was an exciting time of exploration of how to produce listening materials. Armed with little knowledge, but just enough to be dangerous, I frequently pestered David with questions about how to master the intricacies of Real Audio. Real Audio was the most used audio software of the time, and with David’s infinite patience, I managed to get some basic materials ready for student use in June, 1997. They included information about how to use Real Player, and Pure Voice (a voice attachment tool that worked with the Eudora email client, and a selection of links to sites that offered various listening exercises. This very first page can be viewed at http://michaelcoghlan.net/TOEFLHOME.htm As the URL suggests, the exercises were designed to assist students who wanted to practice their listening skills in preparation for the international TOEFL test that enabled entry into university. Actual lesson assignments can be viewed at http://michaelcoghlan.net/toefllessonsplan.htm

The classes were small with typically 6-8 students. Classes were offered from memory in blocks of five weeks. All student activity was asynchronous, with the option of attending a live synchronous session once a week on a Sunday at The Palace, a forerunner of the later more sophisticated 3D virtual worlds. In fact The Palace was a 2D virtual world where participants were represented by avatars who could move around a 2d space and where text chat would appear in chat bubbles next to your avatar. In truth, most of the interaction in these early Palace sessions had little to do with class or study content. They tended to be general and very social chat sessions where students could practice their written English skills, and form bonds with others in their class. From these early Palace experiences I learnt the enormous value of allowing students social time to connect with their teacher and other students to form a sense of community. The later work of Gilly Salmon and her seminal work on emoderation bore this out. (http://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html)

Some students would take the extra step to meet online with me in Yahoo Messenger, or ICQ – to my knowledge the earliest tools that enabled live synchronous conversation. These were usually one on one sessions where students could ask questions about the set listening exercises, or practice their conversation skills.

After more or less mastering the available tools for producing audio for listening exercises I moved on to taking a Reading and Writing class. The first version of these classes can be seen at http://www.michaelcoghlan.net/RWHOME.htm Note the predominance of text and the almost complete lack of images and video! This was absolutely typical of many websites at the time. To my credit though I did attempt to encourage students to contribute photographs to a class community page at http://michaelcoghlan.net/TOEFLClassinfo5.htm But that was a high level skill in those days and few managed to send through photographs for me to post.

As with the Listening classes, the Reading and Writing classes were held in five week blocks with most work done asynchronously, and again with the option of attending the weekly meeting at The Palace.

A significant spin-off of these EFI classes for me was that I began using the materials I developed, as basic as they were, with my students in my paid day job. I seem to remember too that occasionally some of my day students would show up at the Palace – my two work worlds were neatly coalescing.

Around this time I became aware that another EFI class taught by Vance Stevens was meeting weekly in the Palace just before my class. What started to happen over time is that Vance’s students would stay online to join my class so in effect the two classes blended into one and Vance and I would co-facilitate these combined sessions.  I’ll let Vance Stevens take up the story from here, as this is where and how the concept of the Webheads was born!