Micro-lessons as a Response to Emergency Remote Teaching

The COVID-19 crisis forced a rapid shift away from traditional face-to-face, blended, and hybrid learning experiences to off-site learning, drastically reducing the usual planning and design time and negatively affecting the existing scaffolding of an in-class course. This Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis. This presentation will discuss the use of technology for enhancing English for Academic Purposes (EAP) word, above-word, and sentence-level language instruction through micro-lessons. These lessons were hosted on an online content management system to provide support for learners. The lessons learned from this experience should be applicable to content designers using larger MOOCS that are interested in adding micro-lessons to their courses. The main challenge was the short timeline available to the course designers and the difficulty in dividing some macro-lessons into functional micro-lessons. This was relatively simple when dealing with the word level, such as the pronunciation of minimal pairs. However, when making lessons for the functions, the lesson duration tended to approach the limit for micro-lesson length. The functional sentence examples required more visual references, and the large variety of possible sentence patterns required that many patterns could not be included. The functions of generalization and personal opinion usually require a relatively large amount of text input that is time-consuming to assess, but the need for immediate feedback meant that the micro-lesson had to accept student input that was machine measurable. For these reasons, the researcher feels that the language functions would be best presented to the students in both a virtual class and as supplemental micro-lessons that are freely accessible at any time by the students. Examples of the micro-lessons will be shown during the presentation.