English Language Through De in Developing Country 1

ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 1

English Language through Distance Education in a Developing Country

Tisham Mohammed

University of Saskatchewan

Abstract ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 2

World is becoming more connected, so DE platform should be created on a virtual interactive application, so that students could be connected from anytime and anywhere. Moreover, DE course is one the most efficient ways to reach large number of people at long distances. In developing countries is easier to reach more number of students at a lower cost to and grade 9

English Language course will develop their formal writing and understanding skill to communicate internationally effectively. Wiki space will be used to conduct the grade 9 English

Language course as Wiki space offers all the interactive tools to run a class for free. Grade 9

English Language is Classroom tools are free but the course designers and institutions running the course would still cost a lot, so it more number of students will lower down the costs. Course is designed in two parts, reading and writing to develop understanding skill and expressing the imagination through writing skills. Two parts will contain equal amount of evaluation. At the end of the course 3600 evaluation will be conducted. Course satisfaction will lead to attract more students register the course later. The course could be funded and organized by the government, non-government or private investors in a developing country.

Rational of the Study ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 3

World is becoming more connected, so DE platform should be created on a virtual interactive application, so that students could be connected from anytime and anywhere.

Moreover, DE course is one the most efficient ways to reach large number of people at long distances. Think about a big country even if it is developed, people may have to travel long distances to take face to face classes, whereas online classes could easily be accessible to them from anywhere. On the other hand, for a developing economy country, where population is immense, establishing an intuition to teach mass people at a low cost will be feasible idea.

Therefore, many institutions and government branches have more interest promoting and funding online learning and Distant education courses as they believe it allow them saving noteworthy sum of money and at the same time they will employee less number of human resources.

Although, there are lots of debate going around the concept of distance education as it’s being a cheapest form of teaching. President of Thomas Edison College, G. Pruitt said, "One of the biggest myths about online education is that it's cheap. To produce high- quality distance education courses, it’s very expensive (Wright, Dhanarajan, & Reju, 2009). Indeed, in order to produce a high quality distance education course , a lot of funds is required making the distance education course expensive. However, in a different research by Armando Rocha Trindade,

Hermano Carmo, Jos´e Bidarra they mentioned, "Cost saving can occur if a large number of students are involved and/or if fewer educational facilities are built, but instructors, tutors, course production teams, technical support personnel and other human reources are still there and they make up a substantial portion of educational budget" (Trindade, Carmo, & Jose', 2000). So, it clarifies the fact that desiging the course will cost significantly iger amount of money, but the number of students have to higher aswell to get the marginal cost going lower. Moreover, the infrastructural benefit is always there, lowering down the cost. Teaching English language is necessary for students form a developing country so that they can cope up with global arena to. ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 4

U.S. embassies in more than 40 countries are hosting weekly discussions for students enrolled in single MOOCs (Modern Massive Open Online courses) in partnership with Coursera. Embassy employees and Fulbright fellows host the free "MOCC Camp" sessions. Sites include India,

China, Bolivia, and topics include English, science, technology, engineering, business, and U.S. government and politics. All of this activity aimed at extending access to learning is encouraging, but it’s important not to be so carried away by techno-exuberance that we lose sight of some of the potential opportunity costs involved. The danger in overreliance on global

MOOCs is that they don’t build local capacity for education, research or knowledge creation in the education sector (Kamenetz, 2013). English is an important subject to teach through distance education in developing countries, as there are interest groups funding for it locally and internationally.

This study will focus on grade 9 English language through websites; social media pages considering the students will have access to high speed internet service along with hardware supports like the smart phones and/or tablets and/or computer. Also considering the students knows how to use those gadgets. At the end of the course, it will be expected from the students to participate on all the mandatory course participation, and they have understanding of the entire content of the course. And they will be evaluated basing on their constructive participation throughout the course.

Course Organization ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 5

Since this course is focusing grade 9 English language course, so for this grade the course will run for a year 195 days or roughly 120 hours long course a year. Therefore, the entire syllabus will be separated into 80-100 parts of student’s participation, 20-30 parts of assessment feedback to make the class equally participative. Number of students in a class has to be even number students for the feasibility of assigning groups and peer-pair assignments. The course syllabus will be provided on the first day of the course start. Students will register for the course with their details, parents consent and they have opened an id to log into wiki space, they will provide the Id on the registration, so that they can be notified at the beginning of the course. All the students will be added to a private classroom for their course. They have to log in to the wiki space classroom on the first day of the course which will be a mandatory participation and failure to do so will lead them to dropping the course with full payment for their own benefit. First day they will get all the important instructions. And instructor will be available that day according to the office hour to attend all the students with their specific individual queries. The syllabus will be published on the classrooms of wiki space, along with all the important participation dates, class timing, project work timing, peer work and assigned group work timing and all other details. If we starting a DE course on English Language using Wiki space as the technology then let's take it as a process or steps.

Step-1. Let’s open a wiki space account (www.wikispaces.com) and putting the course conductor as teacher. Then sign up with the desired user name and password providing one valid email account.

Step-2. Fill out your personal details to start up with the wiki space classroom. There will be a page like this, where we have to put wiki space name, country name, institution name, subject name and grade name/ number we will be teaching. Here, this project is on English ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 6 language grade 9, so I will put that with the country I will be running the course, and I will put institution name under which I am running the course.

Step-3. Once the account is opened then there will a page like this given below, where we can see there is a pink bar, where there is option called " Members", from there we can invite

100emails at once, and we can invite them to join the class and registered students can easily join the classroom. Next to it, we can see projects, assessment to check how many ongoing projects are there, and assessment gives you the idea of the frequency of individual participation. After that on the right corner, there are different options on the top to start with a class. Page, File,

Discuss, Add Project, Add Event options are on there, each has a different purpose to serve. Page is for opening a any discussion idea with students in tags. Files are for up loading different kind of informative files, graphs, illustration, videos etc. Discuss and page is quite similar, but discuss is bit more detailed with subject and instructor can monitor replies, sending notification by email is allowed unlike page. Project guides the discussion and participation by dates and time bars.

Events allow students know what going on around the clock and calendar.

Since our first objective is let the registered students know that the classroom is open, we can create a "Page", where a topic, attachment of documents, videos, graphs and all other tools ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 7 that could be found in Ms-Word or other high end word processing software's. Then we can add all the registered students on tags so that the students get email notification. Or we could put that on the comments too. However, Putting into a page would be more interactive for the teachers and students.

Step-4. Then, I will upload the entire course syllabus by file or by opening a group. At the same time it will be good idea to put the entire syllabus and class dates and individual class plans in the Event as it works like a calendar. If the syllabus is synchronised with the calendar then the students will be able to prioritize their studies according to the need, and that way instructor will not have to upload the syllabus everyday rather the instructor can utilize that time mentoring and observing how the students are working. Even in the calendar it will be mentioned by which dates students need to form groups and submit projects, then the course will run smooth.

Course Details and teaching Methodology

This course should be a treated as a regular classroom environment in distant Education.

That means students has to participate at a specific time of the day but they will have the privilege of participate in the classes from anywhere. English language syllabus for the grade 9 is particularly a very important for the majority people in the world; it is the most learnt second language in Asian countries. On a News report for National Geographic News, Stefan Lovgen

Quoted researcher Groddals statement, (Lovgren, 2004), “English is becoming a major mechanism for social and economic exclusion and creating new divides. In many parts of world

English is now regarded as a basic skill, like computer skills, which children learn at an early age so they can study through English later". English cannot be denied by any means in order to get a good job or to run a business. Learning English language in those countries are very important. ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 8

Moreover, grade 9 English language syllabus covers all the important topics such as essay writing, report writing, summery writing, letter writing and so which helps in communicating widely to survive and succeed in modern business and communication, corporate and economic era. In the grade 9 students focus on the essay construction with wide range of vocabularies, cohesiveness in writing and more accurate punctuations along with reading passages so that students can communicate accurately, appropriately and effectively in speech and writing; it will make students to understand and respond to things they hear, read and experience. Most importantly it will promote students' personal and professional development and an understanding of themselves and others in an international environment.

In order to run a DE course on English language, students will need to participate in the online classes conducted through Wiki spaces. There are others forms of technologies too but

Wiki space seem to be the more profound one for providing a low cost course the developing country. Moreover, English language for grade nine will not need such integrated tools and tech support like 'Adobe Captivate'. Registered Participants/students will have the time to interact with other students and the instructor that time. Once the mandatory class time is over the teacher and students have no limitation to be online. Before the beginning of the class instructor will open a discussion group and put the lecture materials for that classes. Instructor will open this discussion group where the instructor may need interactive interaction with the students.

However, for the individual works or group works where the students will be working independently, for those kind of works using " project on the bar would be the ideal choice as I comes with a description where instruction could be given. There is start date and end date to keep students working within the time boundary. For example, if the topic is to introduce ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 9

Different types of essay, then there will be clear class room topic uploaded on the Wiki space classroom (Mohammed, 2013). There could be attachments if necessary or lectures materials could be pasted on the space for writing. It could give an open classroom discussion or as project limited to deadlines. Project participants could be selected by the instructor customized or randomly pressing "Assign Randomly" in the project page. Here as a sample the project was created basing on discussion of teaching the types of essay writing, and there were three weeks assigned for it for every registered student, And at the end of every reading students will be asked it analyze each kind of essay and write at least 250 words for each types of essay by the dead and will be assessed. Regular class assignments and projects and group works and individual works would be given in the events and it would be synchronized with the calendar, students will get notifications and at the same time students will emailed to their email addresses by the instructor to reinforce the ideas of participation into students head till it becomes a habit.

Participation is 100% mandatory, and failure to do so students must contact the instructor with a valid reason, and instructor will contact the non participating students for their participation. ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 10

Finally, to monitor student’s participation instructor can always click "Assessment" in the pink bar to check the level of each student’s participation in an assignment to judge and verify the student’s level of participation. Thus, basing on the level of the participation the student could be graded or marked.

Goals of the Learning and Assessment

Through this course students will be expected to listen, read to understand the meaning of things and be able to speak and write about their own feelings, ideas, thoughts and experiences profoundly. And a DE course will enhance the learning as the students will have access to the resources unlimited times for every place to understand the meanings between the lines. Their understanding will clearly reflect in the writings. Moreover the reading passages and finding important issues from it will make the students to analyze things quickly and deeply along with that they will respond to their environment at an international arena intensely. Nevertheless reading passages will make the students to understand, collate explicit meanings and attitude, also they will be able to select, analyze and evaluate relevant things for specific purposes.

Correspondingly, writing will help them to articulate experiences and express thinking, feelings, and imagination. It will help the students to organize facts, ideas and opinions and arguments.

Most importantly it will help to make accurate and effective use of paragraphs, grammatical structures, sentences, punctuation and spelling. Together from a Distant Education English

Language course for grade 9 it will the expected that after finishing the course students can demonstrate understanding of within the broader texts; they can indentify main and sub topics to re-express, summarize and paraphrase them; students can skills of how writers achieve their effects; and find and respond to linguistic devices including figurative language. Moreover, it is also expected from the students that they will write accurate simple sentences, the will attempt a ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 11 variety of sentence structures, recognized the need for paragraphing, use proper vocabulary, express feeling and imagination creatively.

To sum up the ideas of the assessment, students will be assessed under several criteria's of reading and writing and combination of both reading and writing, when it is an assessment of reading there will major portion of the reading materials will be assessed, however, there will be small part writing to be assessed too. At the same time, when there will a writing test, major assessment will done basing on writing along with a small part of reading, the idea of combining is to check how individual student perform on guided writing while focusing on directed writing in a writing paper (WP), and to check guided elaboration skill using own creativity in a reading paper(RP). Throughout the entire period of class the criteria's will be as follows:

Assessment Paper Reading Marks Writing Marks Whole Assessment

Reading Paper 40% 10% 50%

Writing Paper 10% 40% 50%

From the table above we can easily understand that whole criterion from a reading paper is 50%, 40% reading and 10% writing. Similarly, in writing paper 40% writing and 10% reading. Together they make 100|% assessment. This is outlook of the broader criteria this course will be covering and on which it will assessed.

However, if we look deeper into the individual assessment criteria, then for the reading part each question will be answered basing on a passage of approximately 650-750 words which will be uploaded on the "Project" tab of the Wiki space along with a standard deadline, so that a student can finish within adequate time. And students will be notified by emails. Each questions ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 12 will divided into multiple sub-questions. There will two broad criteria of questions one with 30 marks and the other one with 20 marks, together 50 marks for the reading assessment.

For a Reading Paper Example, A Question with 30 marks assessment sub- questions will be based on following for Reading Paper (RP) Question 1:

RP1- To recognize and collect clear meanings

RP2- To recognize, collects, and explains clear meanings and approach.

RP3- To select measure and analyze issues relevant to precise purposes

RP4-To recognize the writers points to achieve effects

A Question with 20 marks assessment, students will respond to different passage created in the "Project" tab on the Wiki Space class with a clear instruction. Here students will write approximately 200 to 300 words response to a writing objective. Sub-questions will based on following things for Reading Paper (RP) Question 2:

RP2- To recognize, collect, and explain clear meanings and approach.

RP3- To select, measure and analyze issues relevant to precise purposes

In addition, the question tests there will be Writing objective of 10 marks. For assessment, it will focus on following criteria,

WP1- To articulate experience and express thinking, feeling and imagination

WP2- To arrange and provide facts, views and ideas ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 13

WP3- To recognize and use suitable varied vocabulary

WP4- To use words appropriate to the targeted audience and context

WP5-To correct successful use of grammatical structures, sentences, paragraphs, punctuations and spellings

Now, if we look deeper into the individual assessment criteria of a writing part each question will be divided into two sections. Students will read one or more short texts approximately 650-750 words which will be uploaded on the "Project" tab of the Wiki space along with a standard deadline, so that a student can finish within adequate time. And students will be notified by emails. Each questions For a Writing Paper Example, A Question with 25 marks and the other one with 25 marks, together 50 marks for the reading assessment sub- questions will based on following for Writing Paper(WP) Question 1 in guided writing

(15+10)=25 marks:

For 15 marks assessment criteria's are:

WP2- To arrange and provide facts, views and ideas

WP5- To make correct and successful use of grammatical structures, sentences, paragraphs, punctuation and spelling

In Addition, 10 marks are for reading objectives, and criteria's are: ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 14

RP2- To recognize, collects, and explains clear meanings and approach

RP3- To select measure and analyze issues relevant to precise purposes

Next part is for composition 25 marks assessment, students will write one essay out of two argumentative/discursive, descriptive and narrative essays. Topics will be submitted into the

"Project" tab on the Wiki Space class with a clear instruction. Here students will write approximately 400 to 600 words response to a writing objective. Sub-questions will be based on following things for Writing Paper (WP) Question 2:

WP2- To arrange and provide facts, views and ideas

WP5- To make correct and successful use of grammatical structures, sentences, paragraphs, punctuation and spelling

Technology Requirements to run English Language Course on DE

DE courses need to meet varied learning needs of the students without ever a face-to-face encounter. Therefore new tools and technologies are emerging regularly, and evolution is ongoing to support new techniques assisting both students and teachers in their learning process.

Specially for this DE course to teach Grade 9 English Language, the technology is preferred is ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 15

Wiki space, as it can reach wide people, course designing at low cost and because of the varied ways of interaction tool it provides, which is important for a developing countries prospective.

According a research on Cooperative/Collaborative Paradigm by Kevin R. Parker and

Joseph T. Chao, "wikis are characterized by a variety of unique and powerful information sharing and collaboration features" (Parker & Chao, 2007), it provides interactive tools to the students to work with each other, and as individual, and to improve the accountability and combined working skills.

Again researcher quotes Miers' s (Parker & Chao, 2007)suggestion that, "Learning should, in part, be cooperative, collaborative, and conversational and Wiki development certainly encourages these characteristics. One of the features of constructivist learning is the inclusion of reflective practice and wikis meet this need as they enable reflection to be experienced and shared collaboratively". Relatively, Wiki space classroom offers all of their features for free to educators and makes no mention of user limits. Offered features include newsfeed style communication between users, embedded media, and dynamic commenting. Also, teachers are able to create events and projects for individual students, small groups or the entire class through which the teacher can monitor students’ progress through individual tasks and project-based learning. The final advertised feature is a unique way to tracking student engagement/activity from the assessment will help to check the participation of the students in their group reading and writing tasks. The teacher can view a type of graph that shows what students are doing within the wiki (reading, writing, or no activity). Providing free classroom for teachers and students make the most efficient tool to teach English language grade-9 through DE in developing country as the , developing countries’ motives for distance learning are to provide basic and literacy education to large numbers of poor people (Zhang, 2005). ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 16

Course Evaluation

Once the course has been completed the course needs to evaluate. Course evaluation is one of the most important part for the success the online course. Since the students and teachers do have any face to face interaction only way to know the areas of improvement is by taking the feedback from course evaluation. Giving feedback to students in all classes is important.

Especially in distance learning classes, it can be more challenging than in the classroom, as the instructor needs to provide individual feedback."You often end up exchanging multiple e-mails and playing phone tag with students. When it comes to providing feedback on assignments, it can be difficult to figure out the best way to provide individual comments to students and return their written work with meaningful feedback" (Center, 2007). However, it is important for the instructor to get feedback from the students and their parents. People may argue, why the parents as the course is not directed to them. But, parent’s feedbacks are as important as the student’s feedback. Customers are the people who purchase your product or service. Consumers are the end users who use or “consume” your product (Customer Vs Consumer). As parents are the one who is choosing the course for them, their satisfaction will lead to positive reference to other parents to get their children enrolling the same course, which will create a good image for the course. And for English Language is developing country where people do not use English, the reference will matter even more to the society.

However, for better evaluation of the course we designed Fortune and Keith's

(Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2003) AEIOU approach has been one promising one.

This approach focuses on accountability, effectiveness, impact, organizational context, unanticipated consequences. Here, accountability covers the part of instructor’s instruction in the beginning of the course and to extent instructor has fulfilled it. In effectiveness, it focus on the ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 17 course and related contents as how well the course was conducted. Then the Impact covers the learning and development area within the students according their perception. Organizational context will cover the policies, events in the projects accomplishing the goal. Finally,

Unanticipated Consequences will cover the changes or the consequences of importance because of the project that was not expected. Question should be more directed and close ended question with yes or no answer sometimes questions answers choices could be depending on degree of the content. For example: Do you think the course instructor has given clear instructions? Answer choices are: Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree.

Institution and Funding

Although the technology is implemented without involving any costs, still the course cannot be offered for free unless there is an available funding from the government or the non government organization. Organizing an English Language in DE would involve the instructor’s payment, curriculum development, and standard assessment and certification costs.

Commercially online English Language teaching has been successful for many online English language class providers at low cost like Open English (Stewart, 2013). If private investors want to take it as a business project they can fund the English Language Grade 9 Distance Education course since there is a lot of scope left for business in the field of online education specially on

English Language. The CEO of Open English Andres Moreno stated (Stewart, 2013) "We’re just really scratching the surface here. We think there is meaningful opportunity to continue to capture market share as people realize this is a better and more cost effective solution than traditional brick-and-mortar schools".

Apart from the private investor, there are non-government organizations keen to provide

Online English Language courses in the developing countries. U.S. embassies funds in more than ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 18

40 countries are hosting weekly discussions for students enrolled in single modern massive open online course movement (MOOCs) originated in North America, two-thirds of their users live abroad—in places like Rwanda, China, and Brazil in partnership with Coursera. Embassy employees and Fulbright fellows host the free. Sites include India, China, Bolivia, and topics include English, science, technology, engineering, business, and U.S. government and politics

(Kamenetz, 2013). Moreover, they also promote online english language. The Office of English

Language Programs in Washington, D.C. provides academic expertise, advisory and consultative assistance, as well materials and resources worldwide. All programs are implemented by

Regional English Language Officers (RELOs) at American Embassies or Consulates. Programs and resources administered through our office include English materials, distance education programs, and teacher training workshops (Affairs).

Finally, local government, schools and other registered institutes can also fund the

English Language grade 9 courses online. For example in India, conventional institutions, the open and distance education institutions in India broadly get funds through three sources: grants from Central/State Government, fee charged to the student, and other internal resources including programme specific funding by sponsoring agencies (Naidu, 2006). This initiative was started in 1986 and it has been even expanding every year, betterment of providing low cost distance education educating mass people in a developing country.

Course Management and Ethical Considerations

Course will be fully managed by the instructor and according to his/ her instructions. There will be three considerations/ rules to manage the course.

1. Instructor reserves all the right to permit, grant, and allow changes to manage the course. ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 19

2. Students will be allowed sometimes to manage some of the discussions but that should be done only under the instructor’s authorization.

3. Any other consideration is required in the course that could be done by democratic rule only if that comply with rule 1 & 2.

However, the ethical consideration will be followed according to the policy of institution running the course. Running English Language course will require a lot a authentic referencing and quotation of the sentences if it is coming from other resources than the students creativity.

So, for the authenticity of the written works, and respecting others work, referencing is a must.

Failure to do so the writings of the students will be an active part of plagiarism, which breaks trust, disrespects the teacher and the real author, harms the good will of the institution. So, it may lead the students first holding an Video interview or call interview or student may be asked to show proper causes of the action. If the student is found guilty, it will lead to get failure grades for the course. So, the things fall under Standard ethical consideration would be honesty, trust, openness, fairness and accountability (Integrity, 2010).first honesty as it is one of the important criteria of integrity. It builds trust; it is respectful of others and shows accountability and responsibility. Secondly, trust all academics must trust that the grade received part of creativity in writing and understanding in reading was done ethically. Thirdly fairness, as students who get a certification based on someone else's work does not deserve to be certified on the first place.

Forth should be openness as the trust builds on the openness of the students to the peers, teachers, society and institute. Finally, accountability as each member of the institute in responsible to carry the integrity of the institution, students escaping with an undesired certificate will bring the institute under question. These are the things would be considered as standard ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 20 ethical bar, failure to do so by students will be violation of the ethical code, that will eventually lead to an desire failure in the course.

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Center, A. t. (2007, August 13). Providing Feedback in Your Distance Learning Course. Retrieved December 2, 2013, from WPI: http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/Teaching/feedback.html ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH DE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY 21

Customer Vs Consumer. (n.d.). Retrieved December 2, 2013, from Chic-Ceo: http://www.chic- ceo.com/customer-vs-consumer

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