Can Students with ‘Basic ICT skills’ Participate in Moodle-Made Blended Lessons?
Abstract
Despite
minimal deliberate blending of ICT tools to individual subjects at classroom
level, today one can observe Ethiopian teachers and students using them for
learning and teaching purposes starting from secondary schools progressively. Conversely, higher education teachers still qualm
if their students with such ICT experience and skills can attend Moodle-made
blended lessons. This study, therefore, explored
how students with ‘Basic ICT
skills’ participated and viewed Moodle-Made Blended Lessons in a
communicative English Language Skills (EnLa 1011) course at Arba Minch University. The general objective of study was to make a case of students with basic
computer skills participating in teacher-made online lessons. More specifically, it aimed to explore the kind of ‘basic ICT skills’ students
possessed at the pre-course stage of e-blended lessons, to examine the kinds of
technical support students required while participating in online learning, to analyze
students’ frequency of access (course participation) to the online lessons
vis-à-vis the skills they had and to examine the students’ post course views to
the online lessons. To do this, the
researcher used a pre-course student questionnaire with conveniently selected fifty
two first year students of Computer Science to examine their initial e-skills
and access to computer, conducted a participant observation to see the
technical support students required during attendance of online lessons,
analysed online participation log to see frequency of access to online lessons
and did a post-course focus group discussion with a total of six randomly
selected participants to see the participants views to the online lessons. The online lessons were developed using
Moodle - a Learning Content Management Software and they lasted for eight
weeks. The study revealed that majority of the participants had no experience
of participating in an e-learning course before and reported to have limited
e-learning related skills at the start of the course. However, all the fifty
two participants accessed the tasks and texts in the five units of the course
with some variation in the frequency of access. These visits in total were 3067 (i.e. an
average of 59 visits by each student). Moreover, nearly all of the participants of the focus group showed their appreciation
to the approach admiring their unlimited access to the online lessons and the opportunity
for self-control of the contents for learning. Consequently, it was concluded that
regardless of their limited ICT skills and their no previous e-learning experience,
students could participate in online learning with the provision of some
technical support either from their teacher or a technical assistant.
Key terms: blended
learning, CALL, basic ICT skills, moodle
