NIVEDITA KUMARI (TOKYO UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN STUDIES)

OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES OF ONLINE TEACHING : DIGITAL LITERACIES/LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TECHNOLOGY

Online teaching has been beneficial for us as a teacher as well as a learner because we could be productive and active despite physical boundaries. While pandemic facilitated higher use of technology, it also helped us improve our skills for distance learning. A variety of possible modes of conducting distance learning are actively used now, like synchronous-asynchronous, flipped, hybrid and blended. Whichever of these modes suits the objective of a lesson is chosen by course instructor. For my course on Business English with a group of 25 students, I conducted an action-research to improve on these issues of online teaching with the help of needs analyses, diagnostic tests, formative/ summative assessments and course evaluation. The typical issues of online teaching chosen for this study are: a. Sense of space b. Social Connect/engaged classroom c. Avoiding Plagiarism d. Fair Assessment The challenge of creating a comfortable sense of space (a) and the pace of developing a social connect (b) amongst students as well as with teacher varies every time for a cohort. Advent of AI platforms and its inclusion in classroom demands responsible teaching and requires the students to be equally aware to avoid any kind of plagiarism (c). Fair assessment (d) for a course plan has been used as a multi-assessment model. The results of action research and course evaluation suggests that these challenges can be overcome with open-mindedness and adept users of online tools to develop digital literacy.

I have a PhD (Linguistics) and have taught in Japan and Thailand for 10 years. For last three years I have been teaching online. I see myself as a University Lecturer, Teacher Educator, and a person with a passion for research in Intercultural Communication, AI, Comparative Linguistics, SLA, Asian Englishes.