On November 30 at KNRTU-KAI were held lectures of an instructor of the Patton College of Education at Ohio University J. Kuhn.
Jeff Kuhn is an instructor and instructional designer in the Patton College of Education at Ohio University where he received his PhD in
Educational Studies. His PhD work focused on instructional design and the use of classroom technology across educational contexts. He has over ten years experience in the English as a Second/Foreign Language classroom including teaching in Japan and Mongolia. He is a frequent keynote speaker on the use of technology in the foreign language classroom and has worked with educators on instructional design challenges in Brazil, Czech Republic, Peru, and Bolivia. He also publishes and presents on the use of video games for learning, computer assisted language learning (CALL) and second language writing.
Professor Kuhn has held 3 lectures in our university on various modern educational techniques of teaching and learning the English language.
The first lecture was focused on the modernization of the study process. Jeff shared some useful and tools and programs that he used in his online-courses for different subjects. He has spoken about such programs as Blackboard and Moodle, which are currently used in our university, and he shared some advice on the increase of their efficiency. Not only for teachers but also for students was the lecture interesting, as they could learn how to diversify their study process.
During the second lecture Jeffrey practically showed how modern technologies can be implied into the English language lessons. He has told how our routine technologies are used in the study process – for example, how to show students different countries and museums with Google Maps or how to improve pronunciation skills with the Google voice identification tool. After that he gave different resources for English language practice as interactive quizzes, thesaurus, etc.
The third and last lecture was a drawing card for all the participants – Jeffrey was speaking about advantages of the usage of video games in the learning process. He explained why we should stop considering video games a waste of time and actively use them during lessons instead. The audience appreciated such a progressive approach to education – the lectures ended with storm of applause.
The students gratefully came to the lecturer with questions and comments about videogames and Internet-sources. Jeffrey was gladly surprised by the curiosity of the audience: “I’m happy that I’ve managed to provoke their interest, they’ve had a load of questions after the lectures!”
At the end of the visit to KNRTU-KAI Jeffrey Kuhn met with the director of the library Galina Ivshina and the head of the department of E-learning Olga Kashina.
They discussed the problems of the E-learning system in American universities and KNRTU-KAI and came up with a conclusion: these problems and solutions for them are the same all over the world.
We hope that there was a lot of useful information in these lectures for every participant!
