Recently my university changed the way vacation classes are run. Previously all teachers were required to teach six weeks during one vacation and three weeks during the other vacation. All hours were considered part of your contract obligations. However now teachers are required to teach only one vacation for six weeks and the hours are overtime pay. Additionally the school has decided to change the nature of the classes offered during vacation.

Previously the classes were called conversation I, Conversation II, Business English and Writing with no curriculum. classes ran 90 minutes monday to thursday and had very low enrollment and even lower attendance. The low attendance was in part due to the courses being incredibly cheap, 70,000 won (us$70) for the six weeks. With a random class size, mixed levels and unmotivated hungover students classes were not particularly fun to teach. This is going to change from summer vacation as teachers are now being asked to put forward proposals.

We were asked five weeks ago to submit proposals, but only five of 14 teachers did. We had a brief meeting today to talk about mid-terms next week and were told that there will be a 60-90 minute workshop in two weeks about the upcoming classes. Basically it seems like the director wants teachers to get cracking. The problem is that there has been very little in the way of guidelines for teachers and only a few teachers have taught anything other than conversation or writing in the past.

I put my proposal together and submitted it three weeks ago and included a detailed week by week outline of what I would be teaching and the goals of my course. At the end of the meeting I talked to the director and was told that my course is most likely going to be approved. The only potential hitch is finding a department willing to share thier computer lab. My department doesn’t have a lab, and Korean universities are notorious for not sharing resources among departments even if they are not in use.

the Course
The course is going to be rather broad in scope trying. The main goal is to demonstrate to students that the internet has a large potential to aid them in the quest for English mastery provided they take advantage of it in a principled manner. The proposed level for my students is intermediate and advanced. here is the abstract from my proposal.

This course will focus on getting students to recognize the internet as a resource for improving their English. It will draw on the ubiquitous nature of pc bangs in Korea and college students’ enjoyment of surfing the internet. The course will be broken down into different components that are both educational and fun. In the end this class will enable students to see opportunities to use and practice English outside of the classroom through message boards, blogs, chats, and other online resources.

If possible I will arrange with another teacher in a country other than Korea to have language/culture exchange via the internet all conducted in English.

I then further broke down each week into tasks. At this point they are not more detailed than students will start a blog, students will perform a webquest but the foundation has been laid. Once I finish the semester I will have two weeks to put everything together before launching my course. I will of course be using my moodle installation as a launch pad for all the internet activities and a resource for feedback from students.

if you will be teaching during July and August and would be interested in doing a cultural/language exchange with students from Korea please let me know and we can start coordinating times and ideas for projects and activities. I am definately looking forward to preparing for and teaching this course.