The Future of Education

This talk will describe a method for peer teaching that increases student independence and engagement. This method was used in two Teacher Training colleges in the discipline of English Literature in a country where English is a foreign language. As part of a hybrid course, students upload video blogs (vlogs) to a moodle forum, in which they discuss specific aspects of the text being studied. The students are given full autonomy as to the mode of presentation – whether as an interview in pairs, with or without visual aids, scripted or not, etc. Hung and Huang point out that vlogs are able to simultaneously “make learners take greater responsibility for their work, and provoke greater anxiety” (2015, p.265). On one hand, our Gen Z students are highly familiar, at least as consumers of media, with the format of video blogs, and oral presentation, in general, is more straightforward for foreign language learners than written. As future teachers, the students are also accustomed to teaching material to both their pupils and their peers. On the other hand, some anxiety about a new, unknown way of teaching in video format is natural. Reflections submitted by each student reveal varying levels of comfort and ease with the format. Nonetheless, the utility of this format for asynchronous peer teaching is patent. And the pedagogical benefits of peer teaching, for both peer teacher and peer leaner are also well documented. As Hattie states in his synthesis of hundreds of metanalyses regarding achievement: “The remarkable feature of the evidence is that the biggest effects on student learning occur when teachers become learners of their own teaching, and when students become their own teachers” (2009, p.22). In this talk, I shall present the research-based rationale and the method of using vlogs for peer teaching as well as conclusions drawn from the student reflections and observation. In addition, I shall show a few briedexamples of the student vlogs.

Keywords Vlogs, peer teaching, student engagement, hybrid learning, independent learning

References [1] Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning. A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York, NY: Routledge
[2] Hung, S. A., & Huang, H. D. (2015). Video blogging and english presentation performance: A pilot study. Psychology Reports, 117(2), 614-630. doi: 10.2466/11.PR0.117c20z6