Episode #81. Saturday October 30, 2021, 7:30 pm EDT
This episode introduces how synchronous hybrid instruction provides learning opportunities for children in under-sourced Chinese village schools. The synchronous hybrid class, built by Project VolunONLINE (支教中国2.0), a nonprofit based in Shanghai, adopts a dual-teacher model with an online instructor and a local classroom teacher. For this show, we will have Dr. Chaoran Wang, a former voluntary online English instructor and researcher of Project VolunONLINE, and Jasmine Zhu, a teacher educator and content developer of the nonprofit. Chaoran and Jasmine will be sharing their stories and introducing their experiences, challenges, struggles, and hopes of working with rural Chinese children and voluntary online teachers. Dr. Chaoran Wang will also reflect on how, as an overseas language teacher, she made use of the online spaces to provide innovative learning experiences for rural students. She will have a short presentation of some of her experiences with children in one rural school in the program at the start. More about our guests below the video.
Chaoran Wang earned her Ph.D. in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education from Indiana University. Her interdisciplinary research agenda examines the issues of online/hybrid language instruction through the intersecting perspectives of language studies, sociocultural theories, open educational resources, and various educational technologies. She is a Multilingual Writing Specialist and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Colby College, Maine. She can be reached at chaowang@colby.edu.
Jasmine Zhu is a teacher educator and content developer at Project VolunONLINE (支教中国2.0) in China. She helps the nonprofit to train new volunteer teachers to teach online classes for primary schools in remote Chinese areas. She also coordinates online teachers to develop teaching materials for various courses like English, Arts, Music, Science, etc. She had worked as an English instructor at a Chinese university for 5 years before joining the field of online education, which she has over 15 years of working experience. She can be reached at jiamin.zhu@ngopvo.org.