Innovation in Language Learning

Distance education requires introduction of “online instructional strategies that create an environment that supports and encourages inquiry, broaden the learner's experience of the subject matter, and elicit active and critical reflection by learners on their growing experience base” (Kim & Bonk, 2006). Therefore, as Çoklar and Odabaşı (2010) state, the biggest responsibility for the use of educational technologies falls on the teachers, being the core of the educational process, which urge formal or informal professional development for these recent digital pedagogies. However, one-day events such as seminars are not effective enough in bringing change to the teaching practice (McConnell, 2013 cited in Becuwe et. al., 2016), so teachers’ professional learning arrangements are shifting towards demand-driven models with teachers as active participants (Lim & Lee, 2014 cited in Becuwe et. al., 2016), which nominate blended mentoring as an effective approach in order to help teachers’ adoption with online teaching environments and effective continuity of them.

This presentation aims to describe main components of an efficient blended mentoring programme for faculty development to teach online. Based on a content analysis of written materials about faculty mentoring published in ISI Web of Knowledge, taking the followings as a theoretical framework: a) Theories for Online Learning, b) Adult Learning Theory (Knowles, 1968), c) Diffusion of Innovation Theory (Roger, 2003), d) Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989)  into consideration, this research analyzes the main components of a blended mentoring programme for language instructors to adapt themselves into online learning environments.

It is hoped that findings from this study will establish the fundamentals of an efficient blended mentoring programme for language instructors to help them adopt online learning technologies in learning-teaching environments effectively.