Rain Classroom-Based Smart Class Construction: Taking Advanced Business English Courses as an Example

Abstract

The internet is transforming form the traditional wired network to the wireless one and moving forwards to the post-internet era which is a break through beyond the limitation of time and space. The technology will bring forth new ways and new tools of teaching. The APP “Rain Classroom” developed by Qinghua University is a typical case. This research, based on the application of Rain Classroom (RC) in Advanced Business English, is trying to build a practical model of smart class. This model consists of four co-related parts. Part one is preparation part with extensive learning resources from the Internet, and then prevision part, the independent and cooperative learning part with task list from teachers. After that, learners enters the Rain Classroom-based classroom learning part, and finally is the after-class knowledge internalization part with revision task list. Author applied the four part model in her course ---advanced business English for half a year. This empirical study compared the learning outcome of two classes, one of them is Rain classroom-based and the other one is traditional teaching method-based. The research discovered that RC helps to promote the equality between teachers and students, broaden students knowledge, facilitate the knowledge application, easily organize learning data, form learning report and finally effectively build smart class. But at the same time, the research found that Rain Classroom is not a panacea to all the teaching problems. It still need a lot of upgrade in question design, learner interaction, and reasonable forming the classroom report.