Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

■■ Including later units on, for example, productive skills and professional
development, which mirror the broad sequence followed by many face-to-face
CELTA courses.
To try to replicate the stimulus and energy that are familiar and important elements
on a face-to-face course, the various forums play an essential part and these
will be discussed below. The good models that trainees usually receive through
demonstration lessons on face-to-face courses take the form of recorded lessons
with a teacher and a group of students, which are threaded through the initial units.
The online course tutor (OCT) on the pilot course overcame initial reservations
about the lack of live models from trainers, realising that ‘video clips show authentic
teaching you don’t get in the input room’ (Paton and Rea, 2012).
Whilst the distribution of the course elements above remains fixed, centres running
the course are able to customise the timetable to meet their local needs within
certain parameters (and subject to approval from Cambridge ESOL), determining,
for example, over how many weeks the course is run or when teaching practice will
take place. The online course units, video observations, online collaborative tasks
and assignments remain fixed. At IH London the course is run over 13 weeks and
the quality assurance is equal to the face-to-face model in terms of assessment of
the course. The assessment by a Cambridge external assessor is exactly the same
regarding scrutiny of course documents, portfolios (in this case in online format)
and observing live teaching practice with group feedback. The grading meeting that
customarily takes place during the assessor’s visit is done via conference call with
the tutors.
There is an OCT who manages the progress of trainees through the online components
of the course, and a minimum of two different teaching practice tutors (TPT), one of
whom can be the OCT, who manage the face-to-face components. The OCT must be
approved by Cambridge ESOL and have a qualification/experience in e-moderating.
The OCT may be based at the centre where the course is run or, if not also adopting
the role of TPT, may work on the course at distance from anywhere in the world.
114 | The Cambridge CELTA course online