Find Success

Teaching EFL Online:

Villanuevas Story

Share this case study:

www.wiziq.com | 2013 WizIQ Inc. All rights reserved.


Challenges:
She was unable to engage her
students and did not feel like she was
interacting with them.
She could not effectively convey
warmth or personality in her
asynchronous courses.
She did not feel like she knew her
students.
Solution:
The WizIQ Virtual Classroom
Benefits:
With the WizIQ virtual classroom,
Villanueva feels alive. She is able
to get immediate feedback from
her students, make the classes
engaging and personal, and convey
the warmth that is essential to her
teaching style.
1
Profile and Passion
Juliet Aleta R. Villanueva, an Assistant Professor at the University of the
Philippines Open University, has endeavored to do four things in her 20 year
career as a teacher and professor:
Provide personalized and collaborative learning for her students,
Be a life-long student who can use her learning to benefit her students,
Engage her students no matter what that takes, and
Never settle for mediocrity in her teaching.
Upon reading her blogs, one walks away feeling a sense of euphoria for the
educational process. She has an almost Austen-like wit about her as she writes
of her successes and shortcomings. An introduction to her educational journey is
an inspiration to educators all over the world.
Villanuevas blogs also convey a humility that you do not usually come by in a
college professor. In an introspective manner, she contemplates her effectiveness
as a teacher as she says in her blog Google Sites+Moodle+WizIQ=Having
my Cake and Eating It, Too!
But I am a teacher I am nothing if I dont see or feel the presence
of my students. How do I engage them to be able to deserve my
pay? Am I even worth my title...? She expresses her desire to be
on top of the most recent technological advances in education
when she says who wants to be labeled as an old, boring faculty
member?
Villanuevas writings are a breath of fresh air among the droning of others lists
of accomplishments and accolades. She is truly a student, as well as an educator
of students and other educators. Her work experience includes being the
Program Chair of Associate in Arts Degree at UP Open University (2008-present)
where she gives academic advice to adult learners. She also oversees the
delivery of the undergraduate degree program teaching and curriculum. She
is currently an Assistant Professor of Faculty Education at the University of the
Philippines Open University and the Curriculum Consultant at the Builders School
(2007-present). She teaches graduate courses online to perspective teachers
and designs and implements inquiry learning projects to grade school students.
In addition, Villanueva oversees the schools curriculum development and
documentation. Villanueva studied at the University of the Philippines where she
earned a Bachelor of Elementary Education/Special Education in 1989, an MA in
Community Development/Community Practice in 1998, and is currently working
towards her PhD in Curriculum Studies.
Share this case study:
 2

Profile and Passion

She is also an avid researcher in the fields of curriculum design and integration,
social studies, language, inquiry learning, teaching and learning presences in
online learning, blended learning in virtual schools, and virtual communities. She
has a research series covering exemplary teaching styles where she
studied and wrote about teachers at WizIQ. In her two part series,
she researched WizIQ teachers Nellie Deutsch, Namrata Arora, and
George Machlan. She notes some personal touches these teachers
have that make the online learning environment feel personal,
including playing of music at the beginning of class, using a
casual tone when asking where the students are from, including a
time for introductions and getting-to-know-you, and using facial
expressions that assist, in a humorous way, pronunciation issues
when teaching a language.

In her follow up study, Teaching Presence of Exemplary EFL/ESL Teachers in

Synchronous Online Classes at WizIQ, Villanueva discusses how synchronous
platforms such as WizIQ have made global language learning possible. In
doing so she points out some aspects of WizIQ that make language learning so
effective online. Video conferencing, multimodal features, and virtual classroom
management tools all contribute to what she calls themes in the synchronous
virtual classroom. They are connecting with online learners, managing the
virtual classroom, engaging and sustaining language learning, and validating
online teaching and learning.

In her case study, she states that the most important aspect of online education
is the role of the teacher and how teaching presence happens through online
interactions among teachers and learners. She believes that to ensure a positive
teaching presence, educators must practice effective design, facilitation and
direction of courses. She also stresses the importance of teachers getting
feedback in order to evaluate their skills. On validating online teaching and the
process of learning she summarizes her conclusions:

Teaching as well as learning presence may be roles which are

possibly played out by teachers and learners, depending on
the teaching style, view/beliefs of the teacher about online
teaching and language learning, which translates to the choice
of methods and activities in the virtual classroom facilitation.
Roles and actions which make for teaching presence may either
be implicitly or explicitly done by teachers and learners. Hence,
further studies are recommended along the lines of examining
these themes.

Share this case study:

 3
Villanueva searches for a better way to
educate online
Villanueva enjoyed her time educating in the face-to-face classroom. She
was able to interact with the kids in the classroom, take them on field trips
to enhance learning, and re-apply that learning in the classroom. Then she
jumped from the face-to-face classroom based teaching at the K12 level to
online teaching at higher education levels. She started out teaching college
asynchronously where she felt disjointed and out-of-touch with her students. One
of the biggest issues Villanueva had with asynchronous teaching was that she
could not convey the warmth that she previously did in her face-to-face teaching.
She felt like her students just wanted to get the course over with and get their
credits. It was not engaging. She also tried using online and offline projects, but
still felt dismayed at her ability to engage her students.

She found herself disappointed with her Moodle classroom as it felt too
structured and as she puts it, cubicle like. She added Google to her repertoire,
and worked with it for a few years, but still felt that her teaching was incomplete.
Finally, she was introduced to WizIQ by a student and combined her use of
Moodle, Google and WizIQ to much success. She uses the analogy of a cake to
describe her addition of WizIQ to her recipe for educating success:

Here come the icing+the filling on my Google Site/Moodle

chocolate cake.

Share this case study:

 4

How WizIQ changed things for Villanueva

Upon adopting WizIQs virtual classroom for her teaching needs, Villanueva
described her ability to communicate live with the students by getting their
feedback on her presentations with the phrase it makes me feel alive.

In her reflections of how helpful WizIQ has been for her, she fondly calls it
education of the third kind. Moodle and Google were the first and second,
and WizIQ raised the bar. She experimented with WizIQ over the summer and
attended other teachers sessions and viewed recordings to further educate
herself until she launched her first WizIQ class. She no longer felt distant from
her students. In fact her students commented on how approachable and tech
savvy she was. She attributes this to the video and audio tools on WizIQ that
brings everything to life for students and teachers alike. She finds now that
WizIQ is a precious tool in her proverbial educating tool belt. In one of her
blogs, she recalls when Moodle was down for an entire week. She was able
to continue teaching while her colleagues sat waiting for their asynchronous
platforms to come back online.

Villanueva has become a WizIQ enthusiast as she has actively worked towards
getting her university to adopt it as their virtual classroom platform. She wants
this not just for herself, but for the benefit of her fellow teachers as well.
Upcoming in 2013, Professor Villanueva plans to present a paper on WizIQ at
the Thai TESOL Conference. Her presentation is entitled Teaching and Learning
Presence in Online Classes of ESL/EFL Teachers at WizIQ.

Share this case study:

 5
What WizIQ Offered Villanueva/
What It Can Offer You
In Villanuevas blog thoughts on WizIQ she states,

It finally dawned on me what WizIQ meant with its tagline:

{} anyone can teach, anyone can learn.

* # Further she praises WizIQ as a platform that allows students to have more
choices in their educational journey: choices of classes, teachers, and
$ + collaboration needs. She calls the WizIQ classroom individualized and
collaborative. She refers to WizIQ as a tool in her belt, the icing on a piece of
chocolate cake, her newest toy and a high-tech gadget.

WizIQ WizIQ is a leader in online education. It is a virtual classroom that allows

teachers and students to be online, live with others. This allows teachers and
students to share content with others instantly. WizIQ has over 2 million users
WizIQ and 150,000 educators. In conjunction with the live virtual classroom, WizIQ is
an excellent way to share content with others. WizIQ offers tools to connect with
your students in real time, create and deliver courses and run an online teaching
business. You can connect with your students by using the text chat box,
face-to-face video streaming, whiteboard tools, shared documents, websites,
videos and recordings. In creating and delivering courses you have access to a
course creation wizard, attendance reporting, assessment and question bank,
courseware and a content library where they can publish and share content in
any format. The tools that help you run your online teaching business include
adding and managing teachers, getting a personal teaching website on WizIQ.
com for free, and integrating your website, Course Management System or
Learning Management System. Whatever your individual teaching needs are,
WizIQ can meet them.

Call us at:
USA: +1-919-647-4727
Europe: +44-(0)-20-7193-6503
Asia: +91-988-500-3232

Start your free trial Request a Demo

Share this case study: