02/07 Interview with Bonnie

Teaching Professor of French & Francophone Studies

Allison and I visited French professor Bonnie Youngs who is also involved in the research (field) of Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, and Computer-Assisted Language Learning(CALL). We were able to get a lot of insights/backstories in terms of computer education system/structure and teaching strategy.

“All student data is logged by OLI(Open Learning initiative) so if you register, it can tell where you are/were, what page you visited, how much time you spent, if you got right or wrong, how many time you clicked video. So they know what students should do or did, while they’re in online course. But this is completely wrong because every individual learns in different ways.”

Bonnie tries to figure out when there are students who don’t do so well, if there is sort of strategy that makes students do better or learn faster. Because she’s seen learners can be successful if they take XYZ in account.

“Sometimes data is miss logged, we don’t know how accurate it is. We spend a lot of time looking at data, watching video and transcribing.. also we are trying different ways of visualizing statistically, how students are using materials online.”

Q. How they are using system..?

“It’s important for them to try more than once, you need to concentrate on. In the end, how help students learn.”

“The problem is how can I keep students interested in French when I see them once a week? Especially when they don’t have full classes in summer. What can I do to help students make progress, keep their rhythm going, how I keep their enthusiasm (because it’s getting harder as time goes by).”

Q. Particular helpful strategy?

“Haven’t gotten there yet. Media, is so important. We spend a ton of money on the media, for the course. 400 videos are in the course, there are 10 that students use the most. It costs a lot of money to go France. Maybe making online courses is not useful because it costs a lot of money and time (for example, going to France, having scripts, shooting film, uploading to clips, make exercises for clips..) keep it more up to date, because Internet changes from day to day, whereas our materials are the same as we put them together 15 years ago.”