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environment and to meet the students. This opportunity is also provided whentrainees change to a new group of students.Observations of experienced teachersAs part of the programme requirements CELTA trainees have to observe six hoursof teaching from experienced teachers and complete, for each observation, a setobservation task. Typically this is conducted by coming into the CELTA centre andwatching 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 forobservations and to provide candidates with additional exposure to multi-lingualclasses taught at IH London, we moved three hours of observation and observationtasks online as videos (drawing upon IH London’s extensive archive of video footagefrom experienced teachers giving classes in a variety of EFL contexts). Trainees thencomplement this with three hours of local face-to-face observation of classes taughtin their own centre.Live classroomsIn 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 needstrainees to raise questions they have with course materials or other aspectsof the course.It was felt that a live classroom would be the most efficient means of dealing withthese two areas, especially as the live classroom (with audio/video-conferencing anda whiteboard) would allow the tutor to demonstrate techniques. The frequency ofthese sessions is up to each centre, as is the content of each session, although werecommend that sessions be fortnightly on a 13-week course such as IH London’s.AssignmentsIt made sense to move all assignments online, especially as trainees would naturallybe writing these using a word processor. Fronter provides an assignment drop box,providing alerts to trainees of impending deadlines and allowing them to easilyupload assignments. Additionally tutors are provided with a full record of traineesubmissions, and can easily add comments and grades and receive alerts foroutstanding assignments.Online portfolioOn a face-to-face course trainees and tutors complete a folder which contains a recordof all the trainee’s work as well as evaluations from the tutor and self-evaluations bytrainees. For the blended programme we created an e-portfolio section where all120 | The Cambridge CELTA course online