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Makale Özeti:
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Online teaching has long been a key area of interest recently in every field of education
as well as English language teaching. Numerous hardware tools, such as, mp3 players,
mobile devices, and so on; and software applications, such as, podcasts, wikis, learning
management systems, and so on, have been used in distance and online instruction and
they have proved to be useful in facilitating learning individually (Finger, Sun, &
Jamieson-Proctor, 2010). Learning management systems (LMS) provide a virtual
environment and various tools to support learning. The current institution where the
researchers work deliver two 2-credit online English courses for a specific group of
learners at a state university in south-eastern Turkey by using Modular Object Oriented
Distance Learning Environment (MOODLE). Moodle is an open code LMS which provides
teachers and course developers with numerous online tools to enhance distance
learning/teaching environment.
The course has both a synchronous and asynchronous instruction. Synchronous and
asynchronous instructions are associated with the delivery of content in campus-based
environments; however, their role differs in off the campus environments as they solve
the problems of distance learners. Universities, colleges, and other education
institutions are integrating online learning into every aspect of higher education. Many
teachers and faculty members at higher education institutions who already run face-toface
courses have a website to post lecture notes or slide presentations as well as other
course material. There is no doubt that these are effective strategies to expand
teaching efforts. Still, there are other educators who design and teach totally online
classes. The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate learners’ attitudes towards these
online language courses, and there are two objectives of this research.
The first one is to discover learners’ attitudes towards the online English course; and
the second purpose is to evaluate and correlate learners’ attitudes with their success
determined with their end-of-the-year grades.
For the unique purpose of this study, an Online Language Learning Attitude Test
(OLLAT) has been constructed and distributed to about 7000 learners who were invited
to complete this task online. 3516 of these learners took the OLLAT voluntarily and
1783 were successfully completed the test and were included in this study. The
findings showed that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between
learners’ OLLAT scores and their course success.
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