In spring 2020 both teachers and learners experienced the interruption of education as it had been established for over 150 years and seemed to be unchangeable. The paper focuses on students’ perspectives on how they perceive the changes in learning due to the pandemic educational emergency response based on the results of a survey of students in four countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Poland and Turkey. We aim at discussing the data collected at the end of the 2019-2020 Spring semester. The research focuses on the accessibility of the tools for learning, modes of instruction, as well as interaction patterns. In addition, we present students’ opinions on the difficulties they experienced, the learning strategies they adopted and what aspects of online learning should remain as a regular educational practice after the pandemic period.
Online crowdsourcing sites/platforms have become popular in recent years. This study aims to uncover when, where, and how language learners in Turkey (TUR), Poland (POL), Macedonia (MAC), and Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) make use of the available crowdsourcing websites/games to learn foreign languages. To ensure parallelism among the data collected in the four countries, a cross-culturally appropriate online questionnaire in English comprised of two parts was designed for this study. Part one gathered information about the use of crowdsourcing sites, tools, and games, while part two elicited background information related to the participants (N=211). The data were analysed considering country- and context-specific variables. The results show that there are more similarities than differences in the ways informants in the studied countries perceive, and employ crowdsourcing resources to learn languages. Therefore, the findings might provide insights for experts, material developers and teacher trainers striving to create cross-culturally valid crowdsourcing platforms/games.
The abrupt change from face-to-face to Online Learning (OL) in the emergency COVID-19 semester surprised and forced students to alter their study habits. Then came the second online period, and students were expected to be happier and more successful since now they were familiar with OL. Was this the case? Had the ways students learned, their perceptions of human interactions among teachers and students in OL, their opinions on the learning environment and their computer literacy changed? Our paper aims to answer those questions using comparative analyses of data sets from the first and second OL periods and attempts to uncover the positive and negative shifts and the topics that remained unchanged. The study’s findings show that COVID-19 related educational changes had multidirectional influences on students’ learning, ingroup interactions, and views about education and OL. Hopefully, the empirical data collected in this study will provide valuable information about OL’s immediate and prolonged effects.
The paper presents a cross-European survey on teachers and crowdsourcing. The survey examines how familiar language teachers are with the concept of crowdsourcing and addresses their attitude towards including crowdsourcing into language teaching activities. The survey was administrated via an online questionnaire and collected volunteers’ data on: (a) teachers’ experience with organizing crowdsourcing activities for students/pupils, (b) the development of crowdsourced resources and materials as well as (c) teachers’ motivation for participating in or employing crowdsourcing activities. The questionnaire was disseminated in over 30 European countries. The final sample comprises 1129 language teachers aged 20 to 65, mostly working at institutions of tertiary education. The data indicates that many participants are not familiar with the concept of crowdsourcing resulting in a low rate of crowdsourcing activities in the classroom. However, a high percentage of responding teachers is potentially willing to crowdsource teaching materials for the language(s) they teach. They are particularly willing to collaborate with other teachers in the creation of interactive digital learning materials, and to select, edit, and share language examples for exercises or tests. Since the inclusion of crowdsourcing activities in language teaching is still in its initial stage, steps for further research are highlighted.
The popularity of online crowdsourcing platforms was slowly increasing among language learners before the pandemic, but COVID-19 changed the educational systems worldwide. This study aims to uncover whether or not, and if ‘YES’, how the attitudes and habits of language learners concerning the use of crowdsourcing materials in Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of North Macedonia and Poland changed during the pandemic. To compare the pre-and during the covid crowdsourcing tool usage, the cross-culturally appropriate questionnaire utilised in the pre-COVID-19 period was used again. The collected data were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively to identify the differences between the periods. The study’s findings showed that the shift from face-to-face to online learning significantly affected the development of crowdsourcing platforms worldwide and their employment in the studied countries. The results also demonstrated that a combination of factors, such as reduced interactions with teachers and peers, an increase in workload, and a lack of support on the part of institutions, led to students taking responsibility for their learning. The number and characteristics of the popular platforms changed from country to country since expectations from students varied.
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