During the day, I teach at Kaplan. One day my class and I were discussing the good and bad points of the Internet. I mentioned that teaching and learning online was one of the good points.

I asked my students if they would like to learn English online. My students are all in their 20s. They are very Internet-centric. To my surprise, they all said , “No!”. They all said it would be boring. There is no social aspect to learning online. They thought online language sites were good for practice only (for free).

I never thought of the social aspects. Since they are our potential customers, I thought this might be interesting to discuss.

Please share your thoughts with me.

I feel like this could be a great one-to-many class!

Alan, I believe I understand why students say the social aspect of online learning is lacking. When I tutor face-to-face, I have a great time with clients/students. Part of what motivates people to learn is the personalized, individualized attention they get. The tutor gets motivated, too!

But I urge students to check out eduFire’s new virtual classroom environment! There are possibilities for socializing and making connections with people online here that I haven’t experienced before.

In the one-to-many eduFire classes I’ve taken over the past two weeks, I’ve felt at times as if I were in a “real” classroom. I actually forgot that I was sitting at home in front of my computer!

DJ,

I agree with you. I just like to learn from the students that are not sold on virtual education. It makes us better teachers.

I think there ate 2 opportunities to learn language online:
1. some online course without any tutor. It is very difficult of course because you always need some help, to ask something…. And for many peole online language learning means this course.
2. Face-to- Face learning. I think many peole don’t have enough information about this way to learn language.
Whe I first found eduFire site my first mind was it is not possible….But it is possible ))))

I have taught at other website and I always missed an opportunity to talk to other tutor. I think this is great that all learners and teachers can discuss things here. Some live chat would be even better!

I’ve been a teacher at a school for some years, and now at eduFire. I don’t find any difference, as both are face-to-face, and one-to-one.
I think the “problem” is that on-line teaching is now starting, and people don’t know quite well how it works, and what they are going to find here.
I’ve hosted students at home (full immersion programmes, learning at your teacher’s home), and afterwards, I’ve kept teaching them on-line. They were mainly from China, and they are very used to do everything through internet, as they don’t have many opportunities to travel abroad or find a native teacher (qualified native teacher). This is well summarized by the Spanish saying: “El hambre agudiza el ingenio” – " Hunger sharpens one’s wits"

I have been a private teacher for adult students, and now I am happy to be on edufire.
If a teacher has a clear way of teaching, it will be easy to face a lesson, either for the student and the teacher.
An experience at Edufire, in my opinion, is really educative, not only for the student but also for the teacher.

I see at work all the time that if I like someone I am more likely to learn new things from them. If not, I have walls up. Learning on eduFire gives the face & personality to the lesson that can make a student open up to learning that other online learning formats don’t.

Another thing I noticed in the few one-to-many classes I have taken here is how we are all looking for the social aspect -writing little notes or emoticons to each other during class. This is how different online classrooms are than physical classrooms. What is normally conveyed in a glance or smile in a physical classroom translates to little chat-notes online. This will take some getting used to for the teachers. It can be seen as disruptive, but to me it’s necessary. (and perhaps it will settle down after we all get used to the format? and perhaps it’s because we are all already “friends” in the forums?)

Hmmm….It would be fun to conduct different experiments around this….

I think that it’s true, you might not be able to check out the cute guy or girl sitting next to you online, but, you can still interact with them. You can use rich media on-line, just like you might use in the classroom. You have a class of fewer students online than in a regular classroom. An online classroom might cost less than a regular class for one semester, too. Online, you can drop out if needed without losing your tuition. In some cases you might get college credit for an online class or at least be able to prove that you have mastered skills to pass a test and continue on to the next level. I love the idea of learning or tutoring from my computer though.

I’m not a tutor, but I think this is an interesting topic. If you had asked me before I knew about eduFire if I would do a live one-on-one or group class through the Internet I would have said no way. And maybe if I wasn’t a Community Manager I still wouldn’t have paid for a tutor and tried it out. But I can say that after taking several online sessions, this is by far the best way to learn for me. In a classroom there are students of different levels, so often times you are left bored or feeling lost depending on the other students. Sometimes I used to be shy in a large classroom and I wouldn’t get much practice speaking. So, eduFire is really the answer for me. It would be an interesting experiment to let each one of your students take a free session and then see what they say about the experience.

One good thing about online learning is that you don’t have to deal with some of the negative aspects of learning that students face when they attend a school setting. For example, it’s easier to prevent social bullying online because the interaction is pretty much monitored. I don’t know if anyone here on Edufire ever experienced being bullied when they were young but I used to see it happen all the time at school. Most of the time the teachers did nothing about it because they just couldn’t monitor every social interaction that goes on.