1From a pedagogical point of view, we live today in an age of learner-centered instruction delivery. At the same time, technology has enabled learning across wide boundaries by autonomous or self-directed learners, individuals who, without mentoring from teachers, are able to establish their learning objectives, determine how to achieve these and are capable of evaluating individually how well they have achieved them. The role of the teacher or instructor is quite different under such a context compared to a traditional on-campus or face-to-face teacher-learner interaction pattern.
2This paper is at the junction between two related pedagogical themes. First, there is a focus on the pedagogical exploitation of video images in adult ESL learning and teaching situations. Secondly, the question of learner autonomy or self–directed learning is explored by assessing the extent to which off-campus learners are able to attain appreciable levels of visual literacy with or without teacher inputs. The aim is to assess learning conditions. Do these allow learners to take charge of all the phases involved in their learning process (what might be qualified as the ‘pull’ approach since learners symbolically pull the teacher, as one of several resources, into their learning space) or encourage teacher control and guidance (what might be qualified as the ‘push’ approach with the teacher defining learning goals, content and processes and assessing learning outcomes)? The relationship between teachers and learners thus constitutes an indirect object of examination, the aim being to determine who has a more pivotal role in the distance learning process.
3Two themes are explored. First, attention is focused on visual thinking as different from linguistic thinking. Whereas one takes place in such mediums as video, films or digital images, the other takes place in the medium of words and sentences (Marshall 2007; Arnheim 1969). According to Rubin (1995), video comprehension skills involve an “active process in which listeners [and viewers] select and interpret information which comes from auditory and visual cues in order to define what is going on and what the speakers are trying to express” (p. 7). Visual thinking or visual literacy, fundamental to constructing meaning, constitutes one of the elements of media literacy which is “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of forms” (Aufderheide 1993: xx). Media literacy revolves around the capacity to decode and process both electronic and print media (Christ & Potter 1998: 79). It is an element in the development of ‘multiliteracies’ which involves developing the capacity of learners to handle spoken, written, visual, aural and interactive texts (Unsworth 2001).
4Next, questions concerning distant learner autonomy are raised. This concept is related to the degree of transactional distance (Moore 1973) or the communication gap which exists between the teacher and the learner. It would appear that this distance is linked to the level of dialogue between learner and teacher as well as how structured learning activities are. For Moore and Kearsley (1996), the less dialogue and structure there is, the more autonomous the learner is. We however believe that even under a structured distance learning situation such as that in operation in La Rochelle, where learners and teachers are in constant contact through the Forum (an online communication tool integrated in Moodle, the learning platform), the learner is theoretically still in a position to process information on his or her own. Vandergrift and Goh (2011) show numerous strategies that can be used by learners to process listening to texts more efficiently and effectively, “to control their thoughts and to regulate their learning”.
5The experience involved presenting an authentic video document describing the activities of two different managers to two different groups of MBA students, one on-campus and the other in a distance learning setting. I wanted each category of learners to be able to define the management approach or style used by the two managers seen working in the video document. Video-based learning is viewed as a multi-sensory activity in which the cognitive encoding processes are pictorial and visual, as well as aural and printed. Along the same line, an authentic document was chosen because, according to Bacon and Finneman (1990), authentic oral and written material provides the necessary context enabling learners to better relate form to meaning in the language acquisition process. Though extracts from the video documents were used as a way of presenting content like any other appropriate instructional material (Nicholson & Zadra 1998), in reality, this was as a complement to a text-based study that had been done to identify and define the characteristics of three different management styles: the autocratic, the democratic and the laissez-faire. These three different management styles had been examined in a reading comprehension exercise and their respective characteristics delineated using a variety of elements including systems of decision-making, employee empowerment and frequency and direction of communication flow. What was then tried was to allow students in both learning situations, on-campus and distance learning, to watch the two different video sequences without sound and to try to indicate, using only the visual cues, the management style of both managers.
6The online class had twenty-eight registered students most of whom were professionally active adult learners who had resumed their studies in order to acquire management skills. The students were based either in different regions in France, or outside France (Côte d’Ivoire, Congo, Yemen etc). The on-campus class was composed of twenty-three students who were engaged in full-time studies. Two different sets of CNN video documents entitled ‘The Boss’ were used. These came from a program captioned ‘Quest Means Business’ presented by a journalist, Richard Quest. Each was a documentary showing two managers at work. The first showed Michael Wu, a Hong Kong haute cuisine restaurant executive, at work in one of his restaurants and an American Fresh Food Chief Executive, Richard Braddock, distributing turkey during Thanksgiving. The second video sequence was on Sarah Curran, the Chief Executive of a wardrobe firm based in London, and on Richard Braddock, this time at work in his firm. Since the choice had been made to focus on Michael Wu and Richard Braddock, the corresponding reports in the two video documents were used as pedagogical material.
7The images used in the video document are presentational rather than conceptual because they deal with actions and events (Kress & van Leewen 1996) and also because they provide visible evidence from which analogy and conclusion can be drawn (Nicholson & Zadra 1998). The images were processed in the on-campus class in the following steps: Pre-viewing, Silent viewing, Post-silent viewing group work, Viewing + listening, and Follow-up output activity. Attention was directed more on silent viewing for students to be able to make inferences on which management styles they thought were in operation using kinesic and visual cues. Two key language objectives were targeted. The first was to consolidate receptive or visual language decoding skills under the guise of video comprehension. The second was productive or encoding language skills with some grammatical content on the use of comparatives. In the on-campus group, production was oral and in groups. With the distance learning population, production was written and individual since oral expression in groups seemed relatively more difficult to arrange with learners scattered in different parts of France and in some African countries.
8The pre-viewing stage was in two phases in the on-campus group. The first was a collective brainstorming exercise with the teacher asking the question “You are going to watch a CNN video document entitled ‘The Boss’ without listening to the speakers. What elements should you pay attention to in order to have an idea of who the Boss is and what management style (autocratic, democratic or laissez-faire) he or she has?” This phase generated lots of ideas and elements from the class including the dress code (formal, casual), attitudes that can be inferred from body language such as deference to authority, camaraderie, etc., and work atmosphere (Are people smiling? Serious-looking?). The second phase consisted in looking for ways of interpreting data generated from the brainstorming exercise to define appropriate management styles. Students were asked to draw up a list of thirty possible words that could be used to define work relations and management styles from the reading exercise we had done. The reading exercise was indispensable because it provided students with useful insights into different management styles and their dominant values and characteristics as well as appropriate vocabulary.
9With the off-campus group, the pre-viewing stage had a different character. It was materially impossible to proceed in two phases as had been done with the on-campus students given the location of learners and the fact that English learning tasks were time bound. Therefore students were presented with a list of forty words including the thirty that had been established by the on-campus group and to ask them to tick which they thought could be applied to work relations and management styles. The results were quite interesting because many of the words in the list drawn up by the on-campus group were ticked by their off-campus counterparts. Thus, the physical absence of the teacher in their immediate learning space did not seem to have had any negative effects on the capacity of distant learners to identify useful semantic categories or descriptors applicable to ways those in charge of business enterprises use their human capital.
10After the preparatory work done above, the on-campus class of twenty-three students was divided into six groups and asked to watch the chosen extracts. Each group was given two copies of the exercise in Appendix 1 and a synthesis of what the class had done in the pre-viewing phase, which had been shown to everybody on an overhead projector. One exercise was to be completed for either of the two managers presented.
11There were three viewings for each of the two documents after which all the groups were given time to debate and agree on the most appropriate responses to tick for all the questions on the grid. Each group was then called upon to present their responses to the entire class for a collective synthesis. The results of group work and the collective class work which followed corresponded to what the teacher expected. One of the managers, from Hong Kong, worked in the restaurant sector, was very formally dressed, had few physical contacts with his employees and rarely smiled; there seemed to be a sentiment of deference and distance towards him on the part of his employees. The other was American, more casually dressed, always patting his employees on the shoulder, always smiling and giving the impression of being close to his employees. These were what learners discovered and inferred from their viewing.
12On the basis of this collective class work, each of the six groups was asked to qualify each manager as authoritarian, democratic or laissez-faire and to justify their choice by using any five of the words identified in the pre-viewing phase. There was considerable consensus to qualify the Hong Kong Manager as ‘the boss’ and to justify this with such words as hierarchical, formal, strict, authoritarian, top-down communication, bossy and distant. However, there was debate between the groups on whether the American manager was really a ‘boss’. Some groups felt he had a democratic management style with such justifications as warm, relaxed and informal whereas other groups felt he had a laissez-faire approach with such justifications as convivial, consensual, sociable and team spirit.
13The off-campus learners were asked to watch the selected sequences of the video document using the appropriate section of the exercise in Appendix 2 which they had to send back in addition to their follow-up writing exercise for evaluation.
14By providing distant learners with an explicit processing guideline focused on kinesics (Vandergrift & Goh 2011: 75) the teacher was instrumental in helping this category of learners to better decode visual cues. The decision to provide such a guideline was founded on several factors. Firstly, a few distant learners had enormous learning difficulties in English, many not having used the language since their secondary school days. Secondly, the English curriculum had to be completed within an imposed time frame and this meant providing learners with useful learning props. Thirdly, experience shows that peer group competition, which motivates and incites young on-campus students to collaborate and exchange information, seems difficult to establish in a distance learning context with relatively older learners.
15Once inferences had been made from purely visual thinking and processing, I had students listen to the aural component and asked them to confirm or refute their initial inferences by jotting down any words or sentences they had heard and understood which seemed to corroborate their positions. With the on-campus class, most groups wrote down some or all of the following sentences or remarks from what they had heard either the managers or the journalist say:
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Hong Kong manager: Too much use of the pronoun ‘He’; ‘He knows where he is going’; ‘Michael is the boss’; ‘Only he knows what he wants’; ‘It is his job to determine what will sell’; ‘He has to have the confidence to know he’s right’; ‘The chefs have to listen closely to what he has to say’.
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American manager: Use of the pronoun ‘We’; ‘Team’; ‘I appreciate what you do’; ‘confidence’; ‘Hello everyone’; ‘He hears what’s going wrong’; ‘More importantly, he hears what’s being done to get it right’. The listening confirmed how open the American manager was on the one hand and how self-assertive the Hong Kong manager was on the other hand.
16The same conclusions were reached by the off-campus class in which all the learners used the aural component to confirm the conclusions they had reached earlier only on the basis of the visual cues.
17The post viewing learner output activity done in the on-campus group was a speaking exercise in which students had to chat in English and compare the management styles of Michael Wu and Richard Braddock. Since experience with online learner conversation exercises is one in which there are parallel presentations between members of the conversation team rather than real debates and arguments, the choice was made to give the off-campus group a writing exercise in which they had to use the comparative form as well as link words. There is an online forum available in the learning platform but, unfortunately, this is not a chat forum and so it does not allow oral discussions by all distant learners. The forum only allows teachers to leave print messages to the entire student population and to receive print messages from individual learners. Oral discussions are thus held in small groups of a maximum of five learners per group since such chatting devices as Skype, which learners download on their own, can accommodate only a limited number of participants.
18Learners need to develop pragma-linguistic skills in addition to the listening skills traditionally associated with video documents. Video comprehension being considered as a skill in its own right (Tudor &Tuffs 1991), an attempt was made to explore how on-campus and off-campus learners are able to receive, attend to and assign meaning to visual input.
19A preliminary conclusion that can be made from an examination of what happened during the learning situation is that the cognitive process that accompanied visual decoding and video comprehension appeared much richer in the on-campus than in the off-campus learning community. This was due essentially to two factors. First, physical proximity with peers which facilitated immediate peer-group collaboration, information exchange and information processing. Secondly, the physical presence of the teacher, with whom learners had a direct and contiguous relationship both individually and as an entire group and which enabled the teacher to act as an on-the-spot resource person. Though the teacher was present in the learning space of distant learners, he could not directly intervene in learner-to-learner interaction as he could in the on-campus population. Unlike in the on-campus context where there was both teacher presence (especially social presence) and teaching presence or the design, organization and facilitation of learning activities (Garrison, 2011: 54-62), in the off-campus situation, there was more teaching presence than teacher presence. The results of our teaching and learning experience are presented in Table 1.
Table 1: Assessing quality of video comprehension skills by on-campus and off-campus post-graduate Business Management students at La Rochelle University
|
Off-campus students
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On-campus students
|
Element of comparison
|
High
|
Low
|
Unknown
|
High
|
Low
|
Unknown
|
Possibility of cognitive overload (simultaneous attention to visual and aural cues)
|
X
|
|
|
|
X
|
|
Level of intra-peer group negotiation of meaning
|
|
X
|
|
X
|
|
|
Level of learner-teacher negotiation of meaning
|
|
X
|
|
X
|
|
|
Level of direct immediate teacher input in improving learner receptive, processing and productive skills
|
|
X
|
|
X
|
|
|
Learner control over pace and rhythm of learning
|
X
|
|
|
|
X
|
|
Level of learner participation in defining processing variables
|
|
X
|
|
X
|
|
|
Satisfaction levels of learners in achieving learning tasks
|
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
|
Motivational effect of inter-group cognitive competition
|
X
|
|
|
X
|
|
|
Use of English, target language
|
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
|
20It appears that though guided in their pace, learners in the on-campus group seemed more engaged cognitively in decoding the visual images proposed before confirming their responses using other cues, especially aural ones. There was a high metacognitive component in how the on-campus class processed relevant information because, according to Vandergrift and Goh, “metacognition in action can and should involve peer cooperation and peer dialogue” (2011: 101). The absence of similar levels of inter-learner information-sharing in the off-campus population appears quite paradoxical because one of the many characteristics of distance learning usually underlined by researchers is the conversion of computer-mediated learning forums into a social space for academic gatherings in which peer-group collaboration and knowledge co-construction are central (Egwurube 2011; Dong-Shin 2006). It would have been possible to ask distant learners to choose appropriate video documents on different management styles themselves and to justify their choices by processing such documents. This would have encouraged greater social interaction, made learners the managers of the visual literacy exercise and improved their cognitive implication. The same approach could also have been used on the on-campus class, with the teacher only serving to evaluate student output in all the steps: choice of video document, definition, application and evaluation of processing variables. The main difficulty in choosing such an exclusively learner-managed pedagogical sequence lay in its feasibility, especially with the online class. Since some of these learners had complained in varying degrees of learning overload, being constrained to face professional, family and academic obligations simultaneously, it was felt that most would hardly have had the time to manage their learning alone under the time frame imposed by the university and the CNED, the Distance Learning Institute based in Poitiers.
21The relatively weak level of peer group collaboration in negotiating the meaning of visual cues may be explained by several facts. To start with, since many online learners have jobs, it is materially impossible for them to have appointments at dates convenient to all. Secondly, some learners are in countries where Internet connections and the use of such online chatting tools as Skype are either rudimentary or under close surveillance. Thirdly, the grid provided to them was sufficiently clear and well adapted to processing the sequences on their own. Fourthly, it appears according to Garrison that “text-based communication in an e-learning context would have advantages [over visual communication] to support collaborative constructivist approaches to learning” (2011: 17). It is therefore likely that peer collaboration in distance or non-contiguous learning situations is higher when the information that needs to be processed is text-based with explicit indicators around which discourse and reflection can be organized rather than visual with both explicit and implicit language codes. This means that there are probable learning situations and tasks where online knowledge co-construction is easier than in others. Fifth, discussions held with distant learners when they come to sit for end-of-semester examinations on the campus, show something quite interesting. Outside the formal classroom environment where they are required to communicate in English in response to conversation tasks assigned by the teacher, the language all the learners use on their own to assess English learning tasks and plan ahead remains French, their first language, rather than English, which defeats the terminal objective of second language learning.
22This study therefore raises a fundamental question about distant learner autonomy. Michael Moore (1973) has defined the autonomous learner as the individual who is capable of establishing his or her learning goals, mobilizing needed resources towards achieving these and evaluating newly learned skills. This is echoed by Benson (2001) for whom autonomy is the capacity to take over control of one’s learning. Is the autonomous learner, however, shut off in self-sufficiency? Is the self-directed online learner not dependent on resources and support provided by the teacher or instructor who remains the content and process expert? It is important to strike the right balance between empowering distant learners to handle the learning tasks and assignments given to them according to their respective learning preferences and styles and providing all of them with baseline resources that will facilitate the achievement of such learning tasks. One cannot but agree with Garrison (2011) for whom the concept of the teacher as ‘guide’ or ‘facilitator’ is limited as an educational approach in e-learning. For Garrison, “teaching presence is not possible without the expertise of an experienced and responsible teacher who can identify the ideas and concepts worthy of study, provide the conceptual order, organize learning activities, guide the discourse…and interject when required” (2011: 60).
23The ‘autonomous’ learner thus needs the teacher to help him or her achieve his or her learning tasks. Such help is particularly indispensable in the area of visual literacy and visual comprehension where the teacher is both pedagogical and content expert. Lacking the possibility of easily engaging in collaborative preparatory pre-viewing metacognitive activity to decide what patterns to look for and what signs or symbols to pay attention to, distant learners spread over France and abroad need teacher guidance in mapping out such useful visual keys. One of the frustrations of the teacher is how to adapt such guidance particularly to those who clearly have learning difficulties.
24This study highlights the use of two approaches to generating learner cognitive activity in processing visual cues in a video document. The first, which can be qualified as the ‘pull’ or horizontal approach, was used with an on-campus learning group where learners were able to stamp what may be termed their ‘mindprint’ on all the phases of the learning process with the teacher acting as guide and facilitator. The second, the ‘push’ or vertical approach, was used with the distant learning group where students were receptors rather than producers of the viewing comprehension grid used. These could not leave their ‘mindprint’ on the learning sequence as their on-campus colleagues had done. Here the teacher had a pivotal role.
25One of the questions raised by this experience relates to the difficulty of generating ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ visual decoding learning activities with online students. This would entail giving visual literacy assignments and tasks and limiting the quantity of instructor-defined props. However, since video documents have different subject contents, this means that input from the content expert, the teacher, cannot be totally deleted from the learner’s learning space.
26Another question raised concerns teacher-learner relationships in distance learning and whether teachers should in fact determine and control the content, pace, rhythm and success levels of learning activities in this context. My belief is that distance or self-regulated learning does not in any way preclude teachers. Teachers remain key mediators in the relationship between learners and subjects. Learner autonomy neither narrows the degree nor reduces the depth of teacher input into the learning process. The teacher-learner tandem is therefore applicable to an on-campus learning context as it is to an off-campus one, the teacher performing useful process and content facilitator roles in both contexts. As process facilitator, the teacher supports the learning process. As content facilitator, the teacher enables learner understanding of content.