The DOTS project: Developing Online Teaching Skills

Abstract

The use of online tools in educational settings has become ubiquitous, yet effective online teaching requires very specific skills. To provide teaching professionals with an opportunity to develop such skills in a language learning context, the DOTS project (http://dots.ecml.at) was launched with support from ECML. The team is currently creating an online resource in the form of a Moodle workspace populated with bite-size training activities. Through these activities, teachers and trainee teachers of languages who want to extend their teaching into online spaces can develop and enhance their skills. The training materials are by no means limited to technical information and advice, but aim to increase the pedagogic quality of online language teaching. The training kit will provide self-training materials and worksheets that can easily be integrated into existing language teacher training programmes. Communication tools will also be integrated to make the workspace an interactive platform for communication as well as a resource for training materials. This will include forums dedicated to different topics, wikis for collating examples of good practice, and links to other online training spaces. The materials and tools are suitable both for relative novices with basic computing skills and for more advanced users who want to exchange their views and share their expertise on online language teaching.