Abstract
This chapter reports on participant evaluations of an online professional development course on language assessment literacy (LAL) for practitioners interested in the field. With the introduction and widespread of online courses following the Covid era, the need to evaluate the effectiveness of the new modalities and platforms to deliver these courses as well as the online course content has become inevitable. To serve for this purpose, this chapter presents the analysis of data collected from a multinational online community of language teachers through the end-of-course questionnaire (n=13) and focused interviews (n=6). The results of the analysis suggested three main issues indicated by the course participants: learning in an online community, course design, and course content. The chapter which discusses the emerging sub-themes has implications for teacher educators, researchers, and course designers interested in learning about the participant perspective towards an online course in a multicultural LAL context.
TopBackground
The incorporation of participant viewpoints in the evaluation of instructional courses has become an increasingly common practice. A review of course evaluation studies suggest that the three main motivations behind eliciting learner perceptions are providing the students with their learning needs, acknowledging the positive correlation between learner satisfaction and learning, and identifying any barriers to the intended course goals (Tsimaras et al., 2022). To elaborate, the first reason for such a step is the idea that educators constantly seek to find innovative methods to cater for the needs of the 21st century learners, and transform traditional classrooms into interactive, student-centered environments in which there is active engagement learning journeys (Oflaz et al., 2022; Tsimaras et al., 2022).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Language Assessment Literacy: Language Assessment Literacy (LAL) refers to the knowledge and skills that stakeholders involved in assessment practices are required to have to conduct and use assessment tasks.
Course Evaluation: The process of surveying learner ideas at the end of a class or course to elicit general information on what learners liked and disliked about the course with the goal of improving the instructional design and educational experience.
Continuous Professional Development: Continuous professional development (CPD) refers to the life-long learning and the learning activities professionals engage in to develop, maintain and improve their knowledge, skills, experience, and understanding.
Collaborative Learning: Collaborative learning is an educational approach in which learners work in groups and/or pairs to process and synthesize information and concepts through working together.
Online Learning: Learning in a virtual environment on the internet.
Community Of Practice: A community of practice (CoP) refers to a group of people who come together, face to face or online, to share a common concern, a set of problems, and best practices to construct knowledge to improve a field of professional practice.
Online Learning Platforms: An online learning platform is a webspace which is used to host educational content and provide learners with resources (i.e. videos, oral and written materials) and means (i.e. Discussion boards) for learning.