Page 140 - BLENDED LEARNING

Sustainability
Blended learning often means more investment in resources (e.g. financial, human,
technical) (Garrison and Kanuka, 2004; Littlejohn, 2004), which neither my students
nor I had as it was a low-budget course and my learners were busy. Therefore,
I created sustainable courseware with the following features:
■ ■ short recordings, chunked material
■ ■ reusable learning objects
■ ■ easy to update, reorganise, reassemble or copy
■ ■ limited number of easy-to-use tools
■ ■ easy familiarisation with tools, tasks, and layout
■ ■ RSS, tagging, search tool (see above for an explanation)
■ ■ easy and flexible access to material.

Further planned adaptations
I considered adding students as contributors to the blog so that they could continue
recording themselves, upload the files to the blog and ask for peer feedback even
after the course, but due to the short duration of the course this was not possible.

Another idea was to develop a second module of the course for those taxi drivers
who wanted to take it a bit further with their English language skills because they are
also sometimes booked for private tours and then often serve as guides as well, or
at least have to do more small talk. Connected to this was my idea to conduct short
interviews with tourists in Bursa about Bursa, and make audio or video recordings
which would then be posted on the blog. Ideally, they would be made by students
(for example, when waiting for passengers or on a tour during breaks) and I could
create tasks around them.

Lessons learned and advice
I believe the blended approach helped make this course a success. The short
duration of the course and the few hours I had with these particular students with
their needs as described above would not have been enough to give them sufficient
help and practice in order to enable them to actually use the language at work.
I believe the blended approach helped my students to develop their language
skills in a shorter time and become more confident in using them in real-life situations
as we can see from the comments they made about improving and using some of
what they had learned with passengers, even while the course was still going on
(see Introduction).

Although all students had mobile phones, most of them were not smartphones.
This meant the learners had to go to the blog, download the podcast episode,
transfer it to their mobile phones and print out the transcript. There was no way of
doing this automatically unless they only wanted to listen to the podcasts on their
computer. The other alternative was to transfer the recordings to the students’

136 | Blended learning: podcasts for taxi drivers Blended learning: podcasts for taxi drivers | 137