Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Access to the Internet was a big issue some ten years ago around Costa Rica. I
still remember when I asked my students to download their homework projects from the
university platform, and many of them claimed that they had no means to do so, needless
to mention their complaints that they lacked a PC at home to develop the assignments.
But now we do not fight this disadvantage anymore. Costa Ricans live in a country where
33.5% of the population have access to the Web and 67% out of this 33.5% do have
access to the Internet via smartphones (Cuen, 2014, March 14). The vast majority of
university students have access to the Internet and use it on a regular basis. This is not
an impediment anymore to move ones class to the worldwide web.
One of the obstacles I have personally faced with my language trainees is their
inability to use technology. Just because 21st Century learners have a smartphone and
regularly use social media, this does not mean that they are effective users of technology
to help them learn. As a professor of mine, Dr. Deborah Healey (University of Oregon),
once told us, we teachers are the ones who have to train pupils how to manage the
pieces of technology we want them to use in their learning process to achieve learning
goals. To do this, the instructors need to have training or self-trained themselves before
the actual utilization of a technology piece in a course.
Isolation is one of those problems that can be easily fixed by an educator, so it
should not be a real problem in online learning scenarios. Online instructors must have a
control of the three basic presences in VLEs: instructor social presence, teaching
presence, and student cognitive presence. If these three basic online presences are
present, my role as instructor is to provide students with a channel to synchronously or
asynchronously be in touch with me by means of virtual student attention hours or by
means of email messages that will be answered in less than 24 hrs. The learners need to
comprehend that they are not isolated, and instructors must not give room to isolation,
either.
Bentu-Alonso, X. (2015, July 10). Re: Why is online teaching important to you, and
what are the benefits? [Online Forum Comment] Retrieved on 2015, July 10 from the
Learning to Teach Online MOOC at Coursera.Org at https://class.coursera.org/ltto002/forum/thread?thread_id=271
Cuen, D. (2014, March 14). Es Costa Rica un paraso en internet? Retrieved on 2015,
July 10 from the BBC Mundo webpage at
http://www.bbc.com/mundo/blogs/2014/03/140314_blog_un_mundo_feliz_costa_rica_
web
UNSW. (n.d.). Why is online teaching important? Learning to Teach Online. Retrieved
on 2015, Thursday 9 from
https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/ltto/pdf/LTTO_M1_Importance.pdf