My First Online Course: Text Analysis for Translation Purposes

محاضرة بعنوان فهم وتحليل النص لأغراض الترجمة

تم تقديم هذه المحاضرة/الورشة لطلبة من مصر الشقيقة عبر الإنترنت. كان ذلك أول درس قدمته عبر الإنترنت بالتعاون مع جمعية عتيدة للترجمة وحوار الثقافات.

In March 2010 I gave my first online course, Text Analysis for Translation Purposes, to students in Egypt, in collaboration with ATIDA's newly launched distance and online translation programme. Looking back, it was a lecture transplanted online, and that is exactly the problem.

The course page is here: http://www.atida.info/training/course_details.php?course_id=4

What I Would Change

Looking back at the syllabus and delivery, I now think the course could have been organised differently: in the way the objectives were set out and in the way the facilitation (in truth, teaching rather than facilitation) was carried out. At the time, the organisers spoke of "giving the lecture", as if we were in a traditional face-to-face setting. Both the content and the activities should have been designed to suit the learning and teaching conditions of the online environment. Even so, I tried to diversify the activities and prompt interaction.

The problem was that I could neither hear nor see the students. They could see and hear everything I did (we used GoToMeeting), but I could only follow their text in the chat box. No voices, no faces.

Bandwidth or Culture?

The organisers said this was mainly to keep the connection stable, since audio and video might interrupt it. That could have been solved with proper IT infrastructure. Later, when I researched the ethical and cultural dimensions of e-learning in the Arab world, I came across local cultural constraints, which I can well understand, especially since my small group of students were women. Cultural and religious differences exist and we have to adjust to them in online education. In practice, I read what they wanted to know in the chat, then replied by voice or by demonstrating on the shared screen and whiteboard, where they could follow my slides.

Takeaway

Today I would do something else. What I delivered was a replica of the face-to-face classroom in lecture mode. Outstanding learning outcomes are possible if we start designing the teaching and training of future translators and interpreters for the online environment rather than transposing the classroom into it.