MALL, CALL in EFL

 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