Course

1. Summary of the course

- Proseminar Historical Linguistics: History of English II

- Department of Philosophy and Humanities: Institute of English Language and Literature

- approx. 35 participants, summer semester 2018 (2 weekly semester hours, 14 semester weeks)

- the teaching language is English

- a heterogeneous group with regard to language skills and prior academic knowledge

• most are BA students of English Philology, a few are Erasmus students, some are native English speakers, for most of them English is not their mother tongue, students in teacher training and those enrolled in other programs

- Course contents:

• an overview of the individual historical eras regarding the development of the English language (Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Late Modern English, the English of today) including (pre)historic precursors (associated Old German languages, Ancient German, Proto-Indoeuropean), English-based pidgin and creole languages 
• Focus on text-based linguistic analyses, that are embedded in a general theoretical language change context

- Parallel to the seminar the following courses are taking place:

• Lecture Historical Linguistics: History of English I
• Tutorial on working academically

- Blackboard is used as a common standard:

• Announcements, uploading of slides and other material, discussion forum (see the side project in section 2)

- Expectations:

• by using cooperative voting apps the students can be integrated much more, activated and can join in to add to the variety of teaching methods being used  

2. The course: Blended learning concept

- at the start of the selected sessions the voting platform ARSnova is used in order to either revise the contents of the last session or to answer questions on the text (directly, after the last session on Blackboard, published together with the text)

- all of the students have to register with the help of a smartphone or laptop (in emergency cases, though, everything can also be done with paper&pencil) and take part in a pre-prepared survey after which the results are immediately shown and discussed  

- for the entire survey apprpox. 10 minutes are needed

• Discussion of individual questions and answers, however, could take up more time 

- Goals:

• Revising the texts that were read, of sessions in the past
• Variety of methods (in the course there is otherwise a lot of text work, ppt presentations, discussions)
• Integrating all students
• Activating all students (course start at 8:30am)
  • Discussion rounds often lead to the fact that it is always a relatively small and well-prepared group of students that communicates with the lecturer

- small side project:

• anonymous feedback with the aid of a Blackboard forum (students are requested to post their positive or negative comments as well as wishes for improvement in a forum set up just for this purpose) 
• the aim of the side project is to give the students the chance to evaluate the course and the methods used outside of the official evaluation or to be able to voice their own content-related wishes

3. Implementation of the blended learning concept

- for the realization of the e-teaching project, the voting app ARSnova resp. the variant ARSnova.click was used:

• instead of discussing the text in groups in order to then discuss the questions together in the group, all in all 5 single choice questions were prepared in ARSnova.click
• studnets were able to join the survey by registering ión ARSnova.click with a PIN
• alternative voting apps such as kahoot were rejected at the very start as they were not suitabe for an academic context 
  
  • in the 7th week ARSnova.click was given up on and kahoot was now the preferred tool; ARSnova had tecnical problems on more than one occasion
    • that ARSnova is not the ideal tool was also pointed out by the students in the evaluation; the alternative that was implemented was either pingo or kahoot
    • the creation of survey is not as comfortable in ARSnova as it is in kahoot (when using Mozilla Firefox), e.g. when pressing the backspace key the function 'step back' was triggered sometimes
    • the students had problems again and again when it came to registering, sometimes the survey was started without any intervention by the lecturer
    • what was also found to be unpractical was that the answer time was counted together with the time allotted for reading the questions; in kahoot the countdown only starts when all have read the questions
    • in contrast to ARSnova, the students knew kahoot and in some cases they had already usd it themselves; this was another reason for its usage

- before every relevant seminar session a set of five questions (only in the fnal session was a longer survey undertaken; see example 3 in section 3) was created that could be accessed via a PIN 

- technical requirements for the students:

• smartphone, laptop or a similar device with internet connection
• in case / (n emergency cases, though, everything can also be done with paper&pencil in an analog setting if someone accidentally dosn't have a smartphone or a laptop with them 
  
  • this option was sometimes applied if some of the students came late
  • no account is necessary in order to participate

- every question was shortly discussed in the group

• bot right and wrong answers serve as a basis for content-related discussions

4. Running the course

- three examples were discussed from the teaching scenario

- all three examples demonstrate a different scenario for using ARSnova (later kahoot)

• text reading with accompanying questions, text reading without any accompanying questions, questions without any text reading 

- Example 1: content questions on the text, 23 May 2018

• on 16 May a text was uploaded to Blackboard that was supposed to be read by the next session (23 May)
• four acompanying questions were asked to the text that were supposed to capture the students attention and make them focus
• the ARSnova survey is based on exactly these four questions; an extra question was added; three questions were single choice questions (that means with only one correct answer available); two were short answer questions (that means the students had to supplement a certain word or a certain phrase)   
• an example of a question from the survey (D is correct):
  
  • What were the major sources of Old English loan words?
  • A  Old High German, Italian 
  • B  Celtic, French
  • C  Latin, French 
  • D  Latin, Old Norse 

- Example 2: content questions on the text without any accompanying questions, 9 May 2018 

• as preparation for the session on 9 May, an assignment was given one week earlier (2 May) to read a text on the socio-cultural situation in England's early middle ages
• what was different from the first example was that there were no accompanying questions to the text
• most of the questions of this survey were single choice ones, one question was a short answer 
  
  • with a short anser question the participants have to type in the answer; this answer is automatically compared by ARSnova with a sample answer that was saved beforehand
• example of a question from the survey:
  
  • When did the Normans invade England?
  • Answer: 1066 

- Example 3: Revision of the entire course, 18 July 2018

• in the last session a kahoot survey (originally planned as an ARSnova one) was undertaken with the goal of repeating the most important questions of the entire semester once again
• this survey was deliberately not announced so that the students could not prepare for it beforehand
• the topic of the survey was the coverage of all eras (see the summary of the course); the questions aimed at all levels of language description (phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics) 
  
  • for example, a question was asked as to what the first sound shift (Grimm's Law) was, a topic that was covered in the 2nd and 3rd session, i.e. 11 resp. 12 weeks ago (see the example) 
• all of the questions were single choice ones
• this survey was, at the same time, the conclusion of the entire seminar; it did not, however, have any grading relevance or consequences for the students' grades
• example of a question from the survey (D is correct):
  
  • Which of the following is the result of Grimm’s Law?
  • A man – men
  • B water > Wasser
  • C ceosan - curon > I choose – we choose
  • D pater > father

5. Evaluation of the course

- the implementation of a voting app (ARSnova, later on kahoot) was taken up in general by all students as quite positive

• the above described technical difficulties at the start when implementing ARSnova did not, however, deliver the desired results
• the generally positive view on this e-teaching method at the start was later on replaced by a negative view regarding the app resp. the entire method
• thoss that mentioned the usage of a voting app for revising the contents in the evaluation there was only one positive assessment; all of the others criticized this e-teaching method  
• the following points can be underlined:
  • independent of the actual app being used, some students find the implementation of voting apps as being too school-like and not fitting to an academic context (see the feedback at the end of this section)
  • if in the face of the first point of the method - that it was already being confronted with skepticism early on - it is important that the app works reliably; technical problems have a negative effect on the acceptance of the method (see the feedback at the end of this section)   

- in the seminar there was no forgoing of other methods, so that the surveys did not lose their innovative character even at a later stage of the semester through the use of a voting app 

• altogether five ARSnova or kahoot surveys were undertaken
• a further argument against the more frequent use of ARSnova.click or kahoot is the fact that the creation of the surveys is coupled with time expenditure that is missing in offline consultations on the topics 

- the question a sto the balance between innovative and monotonous methods is, in any case, definitely a complicated matter that does not have a general solution available

- for the first trial run with an ARSnova survey the settings of the time limit for reading the questions and answering it was underestimated and the questions could not be answered in the time allotted  

• in ARSnova surveys the countdown starts with the display of the question; in kahoot on the other hand the question is first shown and only in the next step are the options inserted and then the time countdown is started; therefore, even for simple questions in ARSnova, the minimum duration of sixty seconds for answering a question has proven to be reliable
  
  • amongst other things, also due to this reason kahoot was the preferred tool at a later stage (see above)
• wat is annoying is that it is not possible to adjust the countdown if all of the students are still logged in to the current survey; all participants have to be logged out before the features of the questions can be changed 
  
  • it is not possible in ARSnova.click to change the time settings for the survey as a whole – this is only possible for each individual question

- ARSnova provides two possibilities when creating surveys: ARSnova.click & ARSnova.voting

• with both the same result can be achieved; however, the registration process (both for lecturers as well as students) is much simpler in ARSnova.click 
• ARSnova.voting requires several clicks and a longer PIN; in return, the educator has his/her own profile on ARSnova.voting in which all of the surveys are saved 
• so here we have confirmation that the e-teaching tools need to be tested first before they can actually be applied sensibly for teaching purposes – best would be to use a test audience (one person is more than enough for this)

- ARSnova gives studnets the possibility of also registering with the aid of a QR code; even though I integrated the QR code in my ppt presentations on a regular bsis, this possibility wasn't used 

• a registration with a PIN is much simpler; registering with a QR code requires a QR app (outdated)

- deviations from the original plan

• the original plan envisaged realizing the online surveys at the start of every session; I refrained from doing this due to the above mentioned reasons, especially so that the sessions would not become too monotonous 
• in addition to this, the original plan was to use kahoot instead of ARSnova
  
  • ARSnova was taken as it is an open source platform and as it seems more suitable for the academic setting of the course; it does not have such a child-like, gamified user interface
  • due to the above mentioned reasons, though, kahoot was implemented in the end even if we are not dealing with an open source platform
    
    • in this case the open source component lost out against the smooth running of the teaching process

- as positive I would evaluate that through the integration of the surveys all of the students were actually forced to participate  

• this cannot be ensured if questions are discussed during a (group) discussion as usually it is only a minority of the students that put up their hands and actively participate 

- the possibility of writing anonymous feedback in a Blackboard forum was, in the end, not taken up even though I mentioned the possibility of doing this several times

• it was not, however, due to the fact that there were no wishes, criticism or praise as feedback was given in the evaluation 

- the usage of the voting app for teaching purposes was also mentioned several times in the official evaluation:  

• positive aspects of the course: arsnova.click testing (person 1), the materials used are very helpful, as well as the quiz (person 2)
• negative aspects of the course: quizzes via smartphone (person 3),the online quiz (person 4), whilst the quizzes via smartphone are a great idea, one should maybe check beforehand whether they will work (person 5)
• general suggestions for improving the course: use of a different arsnova, for example pingo (person 6)

6. Self-assessment of the course

- the preparation of the ARSnova surveys costs more time than one would expect; at the start I needed about half an hour for one survey

- the students very often also needed more time to register for the survey and there were technical difficulties time again and again

• against the backdrop of these two points, one should consider if the extra effort is worth it and if the students really do profit from the use of a voting app

- sometimes the question crops up how, even with all that, a supplementation of a mainly offline course with a few online elements is a sensible thing to do 

• in my view it is more realistic when one integrates the smartphones and laptops of the students into the teaching environment instead of wanting to ban them

- what was annoying was, as already mentioned above, that I had to replace ARSnova with kahoot in the middle of the semester

• kahoot is simply a lot easier to use and more intuitive

- one thing tat one should take note of is the influence of the sun - my seminar took place in the summer semester and the rays of the sun sometimes adversely affected the projection on the screen

Merken