If you want to learn a language as a working adult, you may recognize this dilemma: if you take one weekly class, the energy is soon gone. You may feel that you just don’t have enough time to commit what you learnt to memory.
On the other hand, joining classes two evenings a week is a challenge on your private life. Yes, your language ability now progresses, but you feel you don’t do much else than learning Mandarin/Vietnamese/Italian or whatever language it is you are learning.
You may have considered or tried (1) taking online lessons or (2) have a language tutor come to your home, but (1) is hard to keep up since there is no imposed structure and interaction with classmates and (2) is really expensive.
I feel Singapore’s language schools can do a lot more to offer options in between.
The Goethe institut offers blended language courses. What this means is that a lot of the learning materials are offered online for you to do in your own available time, but there are also a few time slots at which you come down to the school for class activities. And you can e-mail or call a teacher if you need assistance in the mean while.
At its best, blended learning can combine the energy and motivation of in-class learning with the flexibility and individual focus of online learning.
Put in a macro way to schools, it’s also a great way to boost productivity in the way the Singapore government means it: to deliver more to students with the same number of teachers.
A quick Google search reveals that not many schools have taken the trouble to offer blended courses in Singapore. The Goethe institut is offering it for German, which is great, but German is not exactly the most popular language to learn in Singapore.
In my eyes, offering a blended course need not be rocket science. In its most simple form, a class could meet twice a week, once online and once in person. Or certain exercises can be posted and corrected online, supported by forum discussion. There are is a choice of many software packages that can facilitate this, some of it even open source (i.e. free to use), such as Moodle.
Now I may be mistaken about the lack of blended language courses in Singapore, but if I haven’t bumped into them as of yet, one thing that can be established is that they’re not easy to find. Do post a comment if you know of any.
Why the heck has is there no institution or school in Singapore that has bothered to develop a blended learning offering for more popular languages in Singapore, such as English, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean?
About Guus Goorts
Guus has traveled widely and has lived in The Netherlands, Ghana, Belgium and Singapore. In descending order of fluency, he speaks Dutch, English, Mandarin, German and some rudiments of Spanish, French and Italian. Guus lives in Singapore with his wife and two young children. He settled in Singapore in early 2006 from his native country The Netherlands. After working in a job for corporate training, he founded Yago Languages, Singapore's guide to language learning.
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I should think the problem with blended learning is logistics – that is, organising the material and the teaching in such a way that allows for online and offline learning.
The logistical problem isn’t with the online part: the online material doesn’t present an insurmountable obstacle because each learner uses the material at his/her own pace. I reckon the problem comes to a head when learners turn up for the face-to-face sessions. Now the teacher is operating blind because of having to face learners who are at different points of the learning curve. The teacher has to juggle balls in the air (so to speak) to get these learners ‘on the same page’ (so to speak). That’s an incredibly hard thing to ask of a teacher whose students are operating on their own pace, as opposed to students who have been shoehorned into running at roughly the same pace in an entirely face-taught programme.
The Open University of Hong Kong operated such a blended system for many years since its inception in the 1980s. The trouble was, because their students were studying the materials at their own pace, tutors eventually had to regress to the old-fashioned way of telling students to get so-and-so unit done by the time of the next face-to-face session in order to get any kind of progress from the students. That, of course, somewhat defeats the purpose of studying at one’s own pace for the students.
I’m no insider as to how the OU operates, but tutors I had spoken to say enrolments dipped year after year and eventually the OU had to organise full-time programmes (like any regular university does normally) in order to keep the revenue rolling in. Of course, there must have been other reasons for going full-time regular, but I hazard to say that studying on your own and at your own pace is pretty much anathema to the Chinese mentality of studying, which is more focused on group learning and on group pace.
That’s my take on the weak development of blended learning in Hong Kong, and it may well be the same picture in Singapore and probably other countries in Asia.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment Rob, and best wishes for the Rabbit’s Year!
I can see where you’re coming from. It may be an issue of the student side preferring 100% classroom instruction rather than schools not offering blended programs. I’ve heard stories about distance study programs from major UK Universities that didn’t take off in Singapore due to there not being any in-person classes. One University then decided to start giving classes in Singapore (as the only location worldwide) and enrollment subsequently jumped.
On the other hand, I don’t think there has been much trying by Singaporean institutions. Blended learning being a mix of distance learning and face-to-face, I think it’s not unreasonable to set certain requirements to the pace. That means that students study on their own schedule (some may do it in weekends, others on, say, Monday evenings) but the specific materials that they have covered at the time of face-to-face meetings should be about the same.
This is still about discipline. Some people won’t feel the need to study unless there’s a class upcoming. So there may be a need for pretty regular classes. But all in all, I think there is potential here if schools take up the challenge to figure out a format that works.
A Happy Bunny Year to you too! Yeah, you’re right. It all comes down to discipline and time management. Personally, I don’t mind either way: if the stuff needs to be covered, it gets covered by me. But then, there are probably more distractions in life here in Hong Kong (e.g. lack of unemployment relief) so that kind of takes the steam out of studying from quite a lot of working people.