ON EMBEDDING INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGIES IN ARTS AND HUMANITIES

Abstract

Today many countries use a sort of national qualifications framework to design and structure the education system in their universities. These qualifications are mainly based on a learning outcomes approach. One of the major learning outcomes strand in all programs is about communication skills in all its forms: reading, writing, listening and comprehension. While these communication skills can be assessed in various courses of different programs, it remains that the arts and humanities courses represent the best opportunity to achieve these outcomes. It is well known that the widespread of technology among teenagers and undergrad students has negatively impacted their communication skills. We present in this work a successful and innovative approach to improve the students’ communication skills using what they are familiar with: the technology. The Instructional technology is a modern discipline that embeds technological tools and software in education. It may produce excellent outcomes if used wisely by instructors. We propose in the following several techniques an instructor can use to improve her or his students communication skills.One of the innovative techniques used in our university to monitor the student attention during the lecture consist of asking students to submit the lecture summary electronically in a submission folder. Several learning management systems (LMS) help in this regards, since they ease the instructor task by letting them create an electronic submission folder when necessary with the instructor-desired restrictions, such as automatic end-time and deadlines. The student’s electronic lecture summaries can be used online or offline by instructors to assess simultaneously the students’ class focus, their writing skills as well as their listening and comprehension skills. Nowadays young people prefer listening and watching rather than reading. One of the issues that most of the instructors face when assessing the students’ reading skills is the lack of time, specifically for large classes. Sometimes, it is hard for an instructor to listen to every student in the class to assess her or his mastering of the reading rules, specifically reading some texts that requires specific intonations. To deal with this issue, the instructor may give students electronic reading assignments. The instructor can post selected texts on the learning management systems for students to read and record in the submission folder. In conjunction with text, the instructor can also upload the corresponding recorded reading model as a reference for students to practice their reading skills. The students’ recorded audios or videos are stored in a structured style in the learning management system and can be accessed and assessed by instructor anytime and anywhere. Listening and comprehension are also two major communication skills that students need in their student life and eventual professional career. Again the instructor may use the LMS to conduct electronic tests that assess the students’ listening and comprehension skills through questions on the prerecorded and LMS-stored audio messages. we used formal assessment criteria based on the assessment of the course learning outcomes (CLOs) and the program learning outcomes (PLOs). The analysis of the last two terms results show the achievement of all the communication skills-related CLOs and PLOs with high scores exceeding by far the desired thresholds.