Introduction
In the academic year 2021/2022 the optional subject "Teaching English as a Foreign Language" has been launched in the Degree in English Studies at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) with 584 students enrolled in it. This subject is designed to meet the learning needs of future professionals in the teaching of English as a foreign language, providing an overview of the main methodological principles for English Language Teaching and their practical application. In this way, the contents of the subject "Teaching English as a Foreign Language" are considered in an integrated manner, focusing not so much on the acquisition of purely conceptual knowledge, but rather on training the student to carry out concrete tasks through the design of activities and lesson plans for teaching English.
The evaluation of the course performance is measured considering 1) an individual final exam and 2) the collaborative design of a task plan. Optionally, students can obtain an extra 5% added to their final grade by completing a voluntary task, which consists in creating and sharing a video presentation of their practical work and assessing the presentations made by other work groups. The innovative educational proposal presented in this paper focuses on this voluntary task.
Methodology
The teaching team (TT) arranged to create an educational group on Microsoft TEAMS called "Collaborative Space EILE" (Spanish acronym for “Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjera”) and to make use of Microsoft Stream. Access to both Microsoft Office applications is provided to students by the university through the institutional email accounts. Participating students have to prepare a video presentation of their work and store it in the collaborative group. The storage implies that the presentations will be open access for all students participating in the optional task. The teaching team is responsible for embedding a form in each of the presentations uploaded to “Stream”, so that each presentation can be assessed. Students are guided by a rubric stored in the collaborative group which provides them with the assessment criteria, namely: structure, content, presentation, group work, verbal, and non-verbal communication, as well as the grading scale. Students will have to access each of the presentations using the shared space in Microsoft Stream. They will have to evaluate, according to the established guidelines, the work of their classmates.
Additionally, the teaching team will include a link to the results obtained in each of the presentations. It will be published in the comments section of each video. In this way, the members of the collaborative space will have open access to the resources produced by their peers, as well as to the results of their own and others' evaluations. At the moment of submitting this paper, this innovative proposal is still ongoing, since it is being carried out in the autumn term.
Good practices
The aims of the innovation are:
• To engage students in online dynamics in line with the distinctive methodology of UNED (distance learning).
• To expand the use of digital tools provided by the university to foster collaborative work.
• To design assessment tasks that allow to develop future foreign language teaching professionals’ communicative skills in English language and to promote collaboration.
• To promote online peer assessment to: 1. Encourage students to critically reflect and be more responsible for their own learning progress and performance 2. Foster negotiation with other to come to a consensus, as assessments must be agreed among the members of each work team 3. Produce peer feedback to confirm existing information, add new information, identify errors, correct errors, and improve conditional application of information 4. Develop students’ provision and reception of constructive feedback and criticism 5. Arrange for students to consider and specify the level, value, or quality of a product or performance of other equal-status learners 6. Help students to identify strengths and weaknesses, target areas for remedial action and develop metacognitive, judgmental, and professional skills
Conclusion
The creation and promotion of the collaborative group in Teams has led to a growing interest in the opportunities the platform provides for collaborative work among the students of the subject. The TT has provided precise instructions for the optional task, accompanied by a dedicated webinar and is providing constant monitoring through the UNED online campus forums and email. There are currently a total of 120 students, or in other words, over 20% of those enrolled in the subject, who have requested to join the collaborative group. It is to be expected that the members participating of the group class in Microsoft Teams are interested in carrying out the optional task.
The proposal presented is part of the first phase of an ongoing research. At an upcoming stage the effects of the innovation will be measured. First, a comparison of average grades among students who have participated and those who have not will be carried out. In this way, it will be possible to check whether the measures proposed, such as group work or peer assessment, have a tangible impact on the score achieved in the practical task. On the other hand, the possible existence of a correlation between the implementation of the innovation and the overall academic results will be calculated. Finally, the "Course Experience Questionnaire" (Wilson et al. 1997) in its validated version adapted for Spanish speakers in the university context (Ugalde et al. 2012) will be applied to all students. In this way it will be possible to determine whether there are significant differences between students who have made use of the innovation and those who have not in the set of dimensions the questionnaire explores. In accordance with the objectives of the educational innovation, it is to be expected that there will be relevant results in the dimension that measure the experience in relation to teaching and, especially, in those that deal with aspects of assessment and e-learning.
