Optimising Learning on a Collaborative Online Annotation Platform: Teacher Mediation and Course Design Strategies

Abstract

<p>Situated within the context of English language teacher education at a university in Hong Kong, the paper documents a teacher-educator’s pedagogic growth and insights gained from a nearly four-year journey searching for innovative online teaching practices amid the pandemic. Specifically, it highlights classroom-proven practices developed to maximise the affordances of Perusall, a collaborative online annotation platform (COAP), to achieve the prime goal of enhancing (student-)teachers’ metalinguistic awareness in a Master of Education course <em>Language Awareness: Grammar and Lexis</em>. This qualitative study involved the collection of data from multiple sources: web-based interaction among students and with the teacher-educator, artefacts of students’ work, oral and written reflections on their learning experiences, and the teacher-educator’s observational notes. Findings based on a thematic analysis indicated two critical determinants of teaching and learning effectiveness on the COAP: the impact of the teacher-educator’s mediating role in online interaction and course design. Focusing on mediational strategy use, the paper illustrates how the teacher-educator’s ‘retooling’ of the Perusall functionalities (Tsui & Tavares, 2021) gave the students a more engaging and supportive communal learning experience. Within the premise of course design, it elucidates how the teacher-educator advocated ‘feedback as dialogue’ (Carless, 2016) in the pre-, while- and post-stages of the course through the co-construction of a ‘negotiated curriculum’ with the students (Boomer et al., 2005; Edwards, 2011; Yuksel, 2010). It explores how the students were motivated to read collaboratively and empowered to be ‘Perusall Managers’, taking ownership of their own learning, strengthening learner autonomy and appreciating peer learning (Tavares, 2021; 2022; 2023). How the students, who are pre-and in-service teachers of English, were nurtured to be grammar ‘experts’ and analysts of teaching materials (Tavares, 2023) will also be examined. The study results shed light on ways of addressing the challenges of using COAPs in higher education. Teachers’ roles in promoting technology-enhanced learning using such platforms in university-based classes in the post-pandemic digital age will be discussed too.</p>