A Joint COIL Project in English Language Teacher Education across Two Universities via Perusall: Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies and Potentialities

Abstract

<p>Situated within the context of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), this presentation highlights the use of Perusall beyond a single-course environment. The project is a joint endeavour of two universities, one in Hong Kong and another in The United Kingdom, involving 83 students from the MA(TESOL) programme of both universities who are pre-and in-service teachers of English. Embracing the essence of COIL (Rubin, 2019), its prime goals are to strengthen the students’ global knowledge and intercultural competence, sharpen their collaboration and communication skills, and, most important of all, heighten their awareness of and stimulate their development of a wider variety of methodological approaches in English language teaching. Using Perusall as the key web-based platform that mediates the learners, a series of tasks were designed by the HK and UK instructors to engage them in collaborative, interactive and practical activities both synchronously and asynchronously. Guided by the theories of social learning and the Community of Inquiry framework, it elucidates how social presence (Garrison et al., 2000; Richardson et al., 2017) is amplified by instructional strategies and learning task design on Perusall. It discusses how the affordances of Perusall, especially its video annotation functionalities, facilitate the implementation of activities and support the student(-teacher)s in achieving the goals. The study examines how anticipated challenges on the cultural, temporal, geographical, knowledge-gap and experiential levels were attempted to be addressed and evaluates the effectiveness of the strategies used based on artefacts of student(-teacher)s’ work and their perceptions. Through this, the instructors will reflect on their experiences, share insights gained on their own pedagogical approaches to fostering a global e-classroom, and identify the direction ahead for COIL in teacher education on Perusall. How other online technological tools and platforms were employed or could be used alongside Perusall to connect the learners and maximise the learning impact will also be explored.<br></p>