Shaping the Way We Teach English - The MOOC Version

Thursday, March 27, 10:00 am - 10:50 am PST; 5:00 pm - 5:50 pm GMT. To join the webcast, click here.

Jacqueline A. Gardy, U.S. Department of State

Leslie Opp-Beckman, University of Oregon

Deborah Healey, University of Oregon
Jeff Magoto, University of Oregon

Elizabeth Hanson-Smith, University of Oregon

The U.S. Department of State's (US DOS) Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ Office of English Language Programs (ECA/A/L), through a partnership with University of Oregon (UO) and Coursera, is launching the pilot Shaping the Way We Teach English, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) aimed at English as a Foreign Language (EFL) educators, both those who are intending to pursue this field as a career and those already working in the field who would like to revise and refresh their methods and approaches. The free materials and approaches presented complement college courses such as Introduction to Methods for Teaching English.

Enrollment is now open for the two 5-week courses:
https://www.coursera.org/courses?search=shaping

Shaping the Way We Teach English, 1: The Landscape of English Language Teaching (ELT)
Beginning April 7, 2014

https://www.coursera.org/course/shaping1landscape

Shaping the Way We Teach English, 2: Paths to Success in ELT
Beginning May 12, 2014

https://www.coursera.org/course/shaping2paths

The courses may be taken singly or together. They are similar in structure but not sequential. Each course offers different but related topics.

Jacqueline A. Gardy  is the E-Teacher Global Program Officer for the Office of English Language Programs at the U.S. Department of State, which provides more than 1,200 scholarships per year for teachers abroad to take courses on TESOL methodology. She has worked for the DoS since 2011. Prior to this, she taught secondary, adult, and university ESL, and was an English Language Fellow from 2009 to 2010 in Novi Sad, Serbia. She is currently the president of the Washington Area TESOL Association. She holds a BA in Global Studies from CSU, Monterey Bay and a MA in TESOL from American University.

Dr. Leslie Opp-Beckman is on the faculty of the University of Oregon's American English Institute, a program of the Department of Linguistics, where she serves as Director of eLearning. She has worked on a variety of international professional development projects, such as the Thailand-Oregon videoconferencing project and Access Teacher Development Online Program for the U.S. Department of State and the University of Oregon in support of secondary-level educators. She has created online courses available through AEI's eLearning Programs, and video-based training materials and online courses for Shaping the Way We Teach English, currently available online at YouTube-UO. 

Dr. Deborah Healey publishes and presents extensively on appropriate use of technology in teaching, with online teacher training courses through the University of Oregon's American English Institute and workshops internationally. With Elizabeth Hanson-Smith and Jeff Magoto, she has designed and developed the MOOC version of Shaping the Way We Teach English. More information is online at http://pages.uoregon.edu/dhealey.

Jeff Magoto directs the Yamada Language Center at the University of Oregon, a multilingual resource center supporting teachers and students in more than 20 different languages, including ESL. He taught his first international online teacher training class in 1998 using DHL (for video), email (for content), and a very finicky text chat program (for everything else). He’s also a co-author of ANVILL, a speech-based lesson authoring system used around the world.

Dr. Elizabeth Hanson-Smith has been an educator of international teachers for over twenty-five years, working in China, Sri Lanka, Belize, Russia, and Egypt, as well as providing short courses in other countries. She offers free resources for teaching ESL/EFL at her website: http://webpages.csus.edu/~hansonsm.
See more at About.me or her professional page at LinkedIn.

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