Isn’t it a big victory in a language classroom when the students are collaborating on tasks together in the target language and they're working jointly without the teacher being involved? Peer collaboration in the learning process allows for exchange of ideas and mutual support that empower each single student and leads to success.
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Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success. - Henry Ford.
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This is a very common practice in the face-to-face language classroom – might it be through group discussion, games with competitive elements or completing shared tasks in a pair. However, it seems to be less usual when in the online classroom. The lack of a physical common space where to interact makes students perceive having a single relationship with the teacher much easier than with the whole group; on the other hand, it’s difficult for instructors to monitor and safeguard students’ relationship all at the same time.
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However, collaboration creates an environment of trust that helps students feel more comfortable in the learning environment; thus more motivated to actively participate in the language course. A dynamic community boosts students engagement, as it helps align learners’ expectations with the language objectives given, as well as it provides a way to ask questions and exchange feedback via online discussions at any time – fasting the learning process.
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“Grow a community of learners in your classroom” is also highlighted by the National Board of Teaching Standards as one of the five criteria to motivate students – and could be implemented in the online language classroom as following:
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With the aim to help teachers trigger students’ motivation and engagement in the online language classroom, we at Edugo.AI have developed our advanced system to ease students-teachers communication and facilitate the growth of a community of learners.
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In the environment of the online classroom, teachers and students can interact through the integrated live chat, which allows for the exchange of messages and multimedia content. Teachers can post lessons’ reminders, weekly encouragement or allow for more casual conversation among students, who can discuss and actively cooperate while naturally using the target language.
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Within the “classroom”, teachers can start live-classes, as well as create remote lessons with interactive exercises to be shared with students during the course. This way, they can easily combine synchronous and asynchronous training by operating within a single digital environment, thus enhancing student engagement and keeping the motivation high.
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Teachers monitor the progress of the whole group of students, keeping track of the overall results updated in real time, as well as have access to each single student’s performance – monitoring wrong and right answers automatically given by the AI-powered system and marking homework assigned with comments and grades. Thus, instructors are aware of students’ different abilities and main challenges they meet in the learning path. Now they can plan for differentiation and encourage students to support each other, enhancing the feeling of being part of a class community.
