Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

environment and to meet the students. This opportunity is also provided when
trainees change to a new group of students.
Observations of experienced teachers
As part of the programme requirements CELTA trainees have to observe six hours
of teaching from experienced teachers and complete, for each observation, a set
observation task. Typically this is conducted by coming into the CELTA centre and
watching face-to-face lessons (although up to three hours can be via video).
With a view to both reducing the need for candidates to come into centres for
observations and to provide candidates with additional exposure to multi-lingual
classes taught at IH London, we moved three hours of observation and observation
tasks online as videos (drawing upon IH London’s extensive archive of video footage
from experienced teachers giving classes in a variety of EFL contexts). Trainees then
complement this with three hours of local face-to-face observation of classes taught
in their own centre.
Live classrooms
In addition to the asynchronous collaborative tasks we felt that there was a need for
‘surgeries’ that would allow:
■■ tutors to deal with common problems they had observed in teaching practice
(such as difficulties in giving instructions) and to respond to local needs
■■ trainees to raise questions they have with course materials or other aspects
of the course.
It was felt that a live classroom would be the most efficient means of dealing with
these two areas, especially as the live classroom (with audio/video-conferencing and
a whiteboard) would allow the tutor to demonstrate techniques. The frequency of
these sessions is up to each centre, as is the content of each session, although we
recommend that sessions be fortnightly on a 13-week course such as IH London’s.
Assignments
It made sense to move all assignments online, especially as trainees would naturally
be writing these using a word processor. Fronter provides an assignment drop box,
providing alerts to trainees of impending deadlines and allowing them to easily
upload assignments. Additionally tutors are provided with a full record of trainee
submissions, and can easily add comments and grades and receive alerts for
outstanding assignments.
Online portfolio
On a face-to-face course trainees and tutors complete a folder which contains a record
of all the trainee’s work as well as evaluations from the tutor and self-evaluations by
trainees. For the blended programme we created an e-portfolio section where all
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