Social Media in International Education

Slideshare on Implementing an International Online English Language Learning Program

Having read articles on the use of social media in Thailand, the Republic of Georgia, South Korea and Ghana, I noticed some similarities with my own experience using Skype and Rosetta Stone to teach English in Madagascar, Honduras, and the US. 

I joined I Want to Learn English, a 501 c(3) organization, as its sole employee and academic coordinator in 2010. My job was to develop the online English program the founders of the organization had started as a dream of providing English education to the people they had met during mission trips in Honduras and Madagascar. While IWLE was based in the Episcopal Church, it was not an evangelical organization; it was a purely educational endeavor.

The premise of the program was the following:

1. Set up computer labs with internet access and Rosetta Stone licenses in three countries: Honduras, Madagascar, and Delray Beach, Florida.

2. Designate a local lab coordinator and train that coordinator in the use of Rosetta Stone and Skype.

3. Allow local students to sign up for free lab time to use Rosetta Stone and connect to tutors in the US via Skype. **The board of directors had decided that Skype was to be used for voice only. Video was not allowed as some students were elementary school children.**

My job as the only ESOL instructor in the organization was to do the following:

1. Create a formal tutoring program with detailed lesson plans and static visuals (my solution to the no video rule) to share on Skype.

2. Train volunteers in the US who were available during working hours to tutor students one-on-one via Skype so the students could practice what they had learned in their Rosetta Stone lessons.

3. Maintain tutoring logs via the program website (wordpress, google docs).

As stated in the articles we read for this module, there was a lot of enthusiasm for learning online via social media and online tools like Rosetta Stone and Skype. While that enthusiasm was not limited to the younger students, those students were the most fearless in diving into Skype and Rosetta Stone. All of the students truly enjoyed interacting with people across continents and oceans (or even a few exits away on I-95); so did we! The relationships that we were able to build were worth every second we spent in frustration when technical glitches impeded us. I think of some of those students to this day.

The economic issues mentioned in some of the articles (Republic of Georgia, Ghana) were overcome by the funding from the non-profit organization. 

Issues related to social media and the internet are below. Some of these are similar to those mentioned in the Ghana and Republic of Georgia examples:

Time: As you might imagine, the time differences between the labs (Madagascar GMT+3, Honduras CST, and Delray Beach EST...and additional issues with Daylight Savings Time) caused difficulty in finding willing volunteer tutors. Cultural issues of time also occurred. Punctuality was not of great concern in every country...which meant tutors in the US were sitting and doing nothing while waiting for students to log on. There was also the issue of random closing of schools in Honduras and long- and short-term teacher strikes. I had to read a Honduran newspaper online to know what to expect each day!

Internet Availability: Fluctuations in electricity and the major interruption in internet service in Africa during that time caused by a shipping accident resulted in tutoring sessions that were impossible to start or that were cut off mid-sentence. Once the connection had dropped, there was little chance of getting it back in the international labs. There were also bandwidth issues which limited the number of simultaneous calls we could make into the labs. This was critical in Honduras as we needed to tutor entire classes of students with very quick turnover.

Rosetta Stone Online: Online licenses were purchased for each lab. At the time, Rosetta Stone allowed users to purchase time with a real teacher, but this was expensive and was not purchased for the labs. The program worked when internet service and electrical service were functioning; however, the program required frequent trouble-shooting between the lab coordinators and me. This process had to be done via Skype or via a screen-sharing program.

Another issue with Rosetta Stone was the obvious disparity between the life depicted in its images and life in poverty-stricken parts of the world. I had to teach lessons about modern kitchens to women who cooked over a fire and lessons about buying pearl necklaces with a credit card to children who lived with extreme food insecurity. 

Skype: This tool was still somewhat new. Given the restriction of using voice only when tutoring (a decision I argued against unsuccessfully), I had to come up with static images that we could use so that we could practice the information the students had learned in Rosetta Stone. I used clip art from MS Word; I did not purchase the images. This screen-sharing solution worked fairly well but required additional bandwidth. I was able to use Skype with video when I needed to trouble-shoot with the lab coordinators.

Overall, it was the people we connected with via social media that stood out. We made real connections to real people and taught lessons which were effective and efficient. When church members went on mission trips to these locations, they would come back and report the great improvement in our students' ability to speak and understand English. That was a gift made possible by social media tools.