Wearing a comfortable jogging suit she walked from the kitchen into her home office with a hot cup of coffee in her hand and hit the "on" switch of her desktop computer. While the computer was booting up she looked over the printouts on her desk of today's lessons and learning objectives, student lists, and time schedules. She sat down and leaned across her desk to switch on the modem. It was 7.15 a.m.
She first picked up her e-mail, logged off and started sorting through the 20-odd messages. She answered most of them with a short sentence. There were two minor translations to take care of in the afternoon (delivery by 5.00 p.m.!) and a few other messages that she wanted to take time to reply to, but first off to the lessons...
She sent off her e-mail and at exactly 7.30 a.m. logged into the virtual classroom. From a display in a floating window she could see that 7 of the 9 members in the early morning group were already present and chatting to one another. Hans was the first to greet her. She greeted all of those present and began her lesson. The 2 stragglers would just have to catch up.
At the end of her lesson she reminded the group to get their practice sheet from her Web page and logged off. It was time for breakfast.
Does this sound farfetched to you? Could you imagine doing this?
The technology to carry out online lessons is here now, but there are problems with such scenarios:
The usage of the Internet and online systems, while rising dramatically, is still a rather low percentage of the general population. (Don't believe all of the numbers you hear!) It will be a few years yet before online foreign language courses have a user base large enough to support more than a handful of adventurous teachers.
How many out there even have a home computer? They are not cheap toys that everyone can afford.
The software programs for interactive online education are woefully deficient. There are few of them out there and the ones that are currently available don't match the needs of foreign language education.
Software programmers sit alone at their monitors and write code the whole day and that doesn't have much to do with communication. Teachers communicate with people and don't understand much about software programming.
We teachers have to make our requirements known to people who don't have much of an idea about what we do.
Telecommunications costs in Europe, and specifically in Germany, are tremendously high. Only in Iceland are they higher. If you believe in the future "death of distance" and the subsequent reduction of travel costs, then there are still the high telephone bills to pay. You won't save money by avoiding travel costs - the expenses will simply be transferred to your telephone bill.
Of course, online teachers will save time by not having to travel.
Accessing and using the Internet is still a fairly difficult thing to do. Setting up Internet access on a home computer is not easy and entails knowledge of the bits and pieces that have very little to do with actually working online. All of those programs must be configured and there's the "online culture" to be learned. Is it more important to know what a modem does or to learn how to use a modem to teach a foreign language?
Some stuff is just not practical now. The quality of an Internet telephone conversation is comparable to the weak reception of a BBC shortwave radio broadcast. Sound files are huge and take too long to transfer. Video is choppy and also demands high bandwidth to be used effectively.
It's going to take some time yet for reliable aural and visual interactivity on the Internet, but I am convinced that it is coming.
Teachers don't know enough about online systems and how to use them to do their work. It's a whole new paradigm for foreign language education that currently is not easily understood and means an investment of time and money without any guaranteed chance of success.
Have no doubt, online foreign language education is coming to a screen near you in the future and you should be ready for it when it arrives. It's only a matter of time before most of the problems I mentioned are solved and foreign language educators can join the ranks of teleworkers.
This text is available at the following addresses:
<http://darrel.knutson.com/english_educ/online-teaching.html>
Darrel E. Knutson
<darrel@knutson.com>