Overview of the English for Educational Technology course:

This course available in Sultan Qaboos University in language Center .the teacher of this course is Evelyn Stirrat. It consists of four unit. The first unit is change of education , the second unit is personal Production, the third unit is The Ubiquitous Computer and the fourth unit is Marvellous Media .Also , we can find icons for "Forums" and we can find in it a Robot Forum , Quiz Forum , Introductions Forum , error correction Glossary ,Study in Japan Forum and Reading Test 2 Forum. The first unit consist of Video Activities ,Video - Project Based Learning - on Model file , Video - Project Based Learning - on Edutopia web site file , Quiz - PBL Video , The Project Based Learning Quiz ,Feedback on The Project based Learning Quiz Forum ,Vocabulary Exercises , vocabulary quiz , Feedback on vocabulary quiz Forum , Grammar Exercises , Quiz - Error Correction Verb Forms Unit 1 and Quiz - Error Correction Sentence Writing Unit 1.
The second unit consist of Video Activities , Multiple Intelligences Video file , Multiple Intelligences file , My Quiz - Multiple Intelligences ,Feedback on My Quiz Multiple Intelligences Forum ,Vocabulary Exercises , Feedback on Quiz Unit 2 Vocabulary Forum and Grammar Exercises.
The topic of third unit consist of Video Activities , Laptops in Maine, USA file , Laptops in Maine quiz , Feedback on Laptops in Maine Video quiz forum , Vocabulary Exercises , vocabulary quiz , feedback on vocabulary Quiz Forum , Quiz one , Grammar Exercises , Example Computer Skills Handout Word document and Grammar Quiz .
The fourth unit consists of Interactive Radio file and Reading Quiz. Also, this course has icons for test, presentation skills and IT skills. In addition, there is a discussion board to let the student to make discussion together.
This online course help student to discus some topics that they take in their classroom and discuss it in discussion board. Also, the instructor can send the announcement to students if they have quiz and test.

Problem of the study:

The problem is the need to know the real benefit and effectiveness of interaction tools in online courses that provided by Sultan Qaboos University. There is a need to know if the interaction tools like discussion forum do it’s purpose .The purpose of interaction tools in online courses is to allow learners to share their experiences and knowledge, allow students to learn from each other and cooperate in solving each other problems. The purpose behind this study is check if this course accomplishes the purpose and goals for offering interaction tools.


Question of the study:

Do the interaction tools used in English for educational technology course are effective and facilitate the interaction purposes for all the students? Do these tools increase student’s motivation to interact with their each other?


Purpose of the study:

This study aims to determine how the interaction tools are able to motivate learners to participate and interact with their colleagues. It purposed to find out the effectiveness of the interaction tools that English for educational technology course provide. This course is an online course provided by language centre in Sultan Qaboos University. The study objective is to evaluate whether the course learning environment is providing effective interaction or not.


Participants:

The participants of this course are students of Instructional and Educational Technology major in Education Colleges. These students are required to take two courses from language centre that are English for Educational Technology 1 and 2. These two course aims to enhance students’ language in what is related to educational technology field. 18 students are enrolled in this course. Most of these students are on the first or second studying year at the university. Because of that they are still beginners on learning by the online courses. Some of them still don’t know what online course is and how to enrol to it. Also their experience on using electronic recourses is low. Also they are beginners on using interaction tools like discussion forums and chat. Some of them will consider this interaction is not significance to accomplish the course objectives. Because of that the participations frequency is low.

Interview:

We will interview a student learning this course in order to know her view about it. We will ask this student about the advantages and disadvantages of the website and her suggestions to solve the problems that students face during this semester. In addition to that, she will give us her opinion if this website effective in learning process or not.
Questions of the interview are:
1. Do the interaction tools offered by the course benefit you in your learning?
2. Do you learn anything from your interaction with your colleagues?
3. Do these interaction tools facilitate for you to interact with the instructor and your colleagues?
4. Are you interested in using these tools?
5. Do theses tools motivate you to interact and cooperate with others?
6. What are the obstacles that make the interaction tools not effective?
7. What your suggestions to improve the interaction tools job?



Results:

In this section the results of conducting the interview will be presented. After the interview was conducted I get the following answers needed for each of the above question:

1. The interaction tools offered by the online course are benefit the students in their learning and accomplishing the course objectives, the student said. This is because the instructor offers some quizzes and activities to be discussed among the students. This enhances students learning because through the students discussions will let students to learn the attended concepts.

2. The interaction through the discussion forums let the students learn many things. It makes the students acquire communication and collaboration skills. That’s because the discussion asked students to apply the needed communication skills. Also through the discussion students will be asked to help each other in deferent fields.

3. The offered interaction tools facilitate for all the students the need to interact with the instructor or other students for any help or question. The instructor offer a discussion forum specialized for the help questions with the instructor. By that the students will find it easy to interact with the instructor any time.

4. The student is interested in participating in the course because it facilitates for him a lot in the course. Also he found that the interaction help him to improve a lot of learning skills and behaviours.

5. The discussion forum offered in this course motivates the students to participate because it counts for each student his participation and login to the course. Also the participation in the course has some degrees counted by the instructor, so that increase the motivation to participate.

6. There are no obstacles faced by the student because he found the interaction tools used in the course are affective.

7. the student suggest some recommendation to improve the interaction tool job in online course and they are:

· Increase the number of the topics that suggested by the instructor to be discussed in the online course.
· Specify time weekly to let students to work on the online course because that makes students more commitment to participate.
· Increase number of activities and tasks that motivate students to participate in discussion forum.


Findings:

The online course English for Educational Technology offer a very active and effective interaction among students and their instructor. The students find it easy to interact with their instructor or with their colleagues using the discussion forum offered by the online course. So the students are very actively interacts with instructor for any help or question. The students are so motivated to interact in the discussion because the instructor uses many methods to increase their motivation. The discussion forum accomplishes its gaol to make students sharing their help and experiences with others. These tools increase students interest on participating with others in different topics.

Advantages and limitations:

From the findings I realized some advantages and limitation of the course. The advantages are:
Activating the discussion forum by providing some activities and quizzes.
Activating the discussion forum by allowing students to generate a new topic to be discussed.
The instructor motivates students to participate by sending some messages to students that ask them to participate.
Student who has more participation will gain more degrees.
Attract students to participate by including videos.
Providing “any question” forum to allow students to ask about any thing.

The limitations are:
· The course only uses the discussion forum as interaction tool and not activating any chat or electronic mail.
· Only the students who are generating the topics of the discussion, the instructor not generating topics.
· Sometimes students discussed on topics are not related to the course.

Screenshots of the online course: