Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

trainees’ marked assignments, lesson plans and evaluated lessons, as well as their
reflections, are placed online. Trainees are given the responsibility for maintaining this
section and keeping this up to date. The big advantage of such an approach is to:
a. create a permanent electronic record of trainees’ work
b. allow easy access to trainees’ work by all tutors and the course assessor 2
Tutorials
There is considerable flexibility over how these can be delivered. They can be given
face-to-face, over the telephone or online using the Live Classroom.
Conclusions
We ran the pilot course at IH London from April to July 2011. Formal feedback
overall was extremely positive from trainees and tutors and trainee performance
on the blended course was comparable to a ‘traditional’ face-to-face CELTA. This
also appears to be true of the second course (September 2011 – December 2011).
Therefore, early indications do appear to suggest that the blended design form is a
successful one. With the programme being this new, little has made its way into the
literature thus far, but we may extrapolate points from courses run to date:
■■ Where the OCT does not also act as TPT, there is a certain objectivity that will not
be true of a face-to-face course, as without meeting the trainees, he or she will
build up a picture of each through the e-portfolio: ‘you have complete objectivity
on their performance because you basically have access to the teaching practice
documents … email contact with the teaching practice tutors … you get a lot of
information about the trainees but because you’ve never met them, you don’t
have a strong relationship with them … so when you come to do a tutorial ... you
collate all this data and see if there’s enough information there to suggest they
are meeting the criteria … and I think that really does help with the tutorials’
(Cambridge ESOL Teaching Qualifications, 2012b).
■■ One of the TPTs commented: ‘I think teaching practice in the first week, we had
some classroom management issues, too much teacher talking, or too much
fidgeting, just like you would have on a face-to-face course. It didn’t throw up
different issues, and I think if somebody landed from Mars into our TP room,
they wouldn’t necessarily think “ah, this is a different kind of course”’ (ibid.).
■■ There is more time to reflect on and return to input sessions later.
■■ The results of the first two courses at IH London show that among the 26 trainees,
there were two A grades, nine B grades, ten passes, three withdrawals and two
fails. These grades and those on courses at other centres show that candidates
are performing at least at the same level as typical face-to-face courses.
Nevertheless following feedback from trainees and tutors on the pilot we had to
make significant adjustments in the following areas:
2 Each CELTA course is externally moderated by Cambridge ESOL and having materials online, such as
discussion forums, course units and the candidates’ portfolios, greatly facilitates this process.
The Cambridge CELTA course online | 121