Untitled Document

Review of the Onlearn.biz Website

Onlearn.biz is a new piece of courseware, launched in 2003, for students of Academic English and, in particular, for those studying the English language for university entrance. This website stands apart from the regular, often mediocre and uninspiring, HTML and JavaScript-ed ESL websites, which generally merely offer electronic page turning with a touch of interactivity. This stimulating website can be found at:

My review will concentrate on the criteria proposed by Chapelle (2001) who advocates that language learning potential, learner fit, meaning focus, authenticity, positive impact and practicality are the focus for any evaluation of CALL material. The factors listed in the Software Evaluation form used by Yamamoto and Sarvis (2003) (Appendix 1), Kerr (2003) (Appendix 2) and the Web Page Evaluation Worksheet by Everhart (1996) (Appendix 3) will also be considered. Of the numerous guidelines for creating websites, Flanders (2003) writes particularly succinctly about design. His categories of avoiding pretension, excess and problem technologies are particularly relevant when evaluating ESL websites.

Technology, not pedagogical concerns and theory, has often driven the design and use of CALL. Conrad (1996) noted that CALL software was rooted in outdated pedagogical approaches such as audiolingualism and behaviorism and that drills and word processing were the main activities. Only recently has CALL begun to conform to the latest pedagogical approaches and onlearn.biz goes some way towards addressing the pedagogical aspects of online language education. It is widely acknowledged in SLA research and language instruction that meaning is of the utmost importance to language learning, eg: by Vale, Scarino & McKay, (2002). Krashen’s (1982) theory of comprehensible input and the need to negotiate meaning are ideas that have informed the design of onlearn.biz’s learning activities. The site has moved far beyond just boring drills.

Chapelle (2002) emphasizes the need for authenticity and the degree of resemblance of a CALL task to real world language and situations. Tribble (1996) stresses the need for students to develop reading skills using material as authentic as practically possible for their language level. Onlearn.biz seems to have a very tight fit when it comes to learner needs and authenticity. Students will undoubtedly instantly perceive the reason for attempting the exercise.

Onlearn.biz is a site that is designed to help English language learners develop their language skills, with a particular focus on those who need English for academic, professional and business reasons. It specifies in its introductory pages that it believes the learning material will be of specific benefit to those who are taking IELTS (International English language Testing System), with its competency-based banding system and other examinations that are high-stakes, such as the TOEFL testing system.

This commercial site is upfront in displaying its costs in its information section. Its market appears to be both individual subscribers as well as institutions, which are looking for supplementary material at a strong intermediate level and above. The cost of access for large institutions if properly utilized works out at less than ten American cents per hour per student. As Frizler (1995) notes, computers will never replace teachers. However, they can provide excellent and cheap supplementary materials for independent learning to enhance the learning, which takes place in the classroom. Onlearn.biz provides free samples from the major sections of material on the basis of which potential customers are invited to subscribe from periods ranging from one month to one year. The samples appear to be reasonably generous and are fully-functioning so that, for example, the form in the free Business Scenario module could be used to send work to an instructor. The same applies to forms in the Essay Writing module.

Presentational Quality

The ‘look and feel’ of any website sends a powerful message to those who view it. Onlearn.biz looks and feels quite different from many other examples of courseware in that the viewer immediately notices that it is a Flash-created site which requires the Macromedia Flash plug-in. (Since it is claimed that 97% of Windows OS users have a Flash Plug-in on their computers, Onlearn.biz seem to be confident that its viewers will be able to see the material). The use of a plug-in means that there will not be many of the problems associated with .html files that will display differently in different browsers. The rich blues and oranges of the site, combined with white for text and red for lines, make an immediate impact. The Homepage, Information Page (that links to the free samples and has several movie-based texts that explain the rationale of the site) and the main Menu Page are highly distinctive, not only in terms of color but also in terms of an original design that undoubtedly will make the site memorable for viewers. All major sections of the learning material have menus that use the same colors and the interactive exercises inside each section reflect the color scheme. The overall effect is powerful and indicates that the creators of Onlearn.biz have paid a great deal of attention to presentational and web design issues. The screen layout, colors and graphics are some of the highlights of the site. All the screens are full- screen flash movies, embedded at 100% in a HTML page; there is no scrolling of the screens (except for specific reading text boxes). As all the graphics and fonts are vectorized, the screens are extremely fast loading, clear, and undistorted. At a time when much courseware is still dull and lacking in character, this aspect of Onlearn.biz scores highly.

Navigational System

It is vital that all learning material should be easy to navigate and should have detailed instructions for the user. Onlearn.biz has a very complete menu system, which is reasonably easy to follow and provides detailed information about what each section contains. Information about each section appears on sub-menus, which are visible at the same time as the main menu. In addition, instructions are often repeated at the beginning of each individual exercise. For example, the Pre-Listening Page of each Multiple Choice Listening Module explains and expands on explanations given in the sub-menu (see Figure 2). The same principle of offering information twice seems a sensible procedure, especially since steps cannot be retraced using the back button on the browser and it is easy for users to forget what link they clicked to arrive at their present point. This is an important point to stress, as all Flash-based sites are, in a sense, asking users to forego a customary navigation system for one that is specific to the site they are viewing. Onlearn.biz surmounts this problem by information repetition and clear color-coding.

Help screens are also vital in educational websites of this type if users are to fully understand how they are to interact with the material. All major sections have help screens that include screenshots of the exercises that users are proceeding to. Particularly interesting is the fast loading, Flash-based Timed Reading Help Screen (Figure 3) which takes the user through the process of doing the exercise in a series of animated steps. Since the Timed Readings are quite complicated for the first-time user, such a system of help will be seen as valuable.

Onlearn.biz has a very detailed rationale for its design of interactive material. It starts by stating (See the Information page) that much of what is claimed to be interactive in English Language exercises fails to deliver genuine interactivity. Onlearn.biz ties the importance of feedback to the notion of interactivity so that, for Onlearn.biz, only language activities that provide detailed feedback to the learner are worthy of the name. A cursory glance at the material will confirm that many of the exercises provide detailed feedback. For example, the four modules under Multiple Choice Listening offer a comment on every single question choice, explaining why it is right or wrong. Similarly the Timed Readings section follows through with the same technique, namely a special feedback box that details why answers are right or wrong, combined with a color-coded text for easy reference.

Onlearn.biz also claims to have a wide variety of subject matter, which can be verified by skimming through sections of major content areas. For example, the Input Listening section has diverse topics such as: Tea Myths, Bullying Bosses, A Web of Fraud, Water, The Key Ring Drive and Successful Marriages. Similarly, the Timed Readings cover a range of topics, as can be seen from the titles: Monkeys, Trams, Whales, Penguins, Police, Passports, Cables, Higher Education, Gunpowder and Tourism. All of this suggests that Onlearn.biz fulfils the essential prerequisite of all learning material, namely that it is interesting and clearly presented.

The content is divided up into broad skill areas:
Listening
Reading
Writing
Graphs
Test Preparation
Business Scenarios

The Listening Section is subdivided into longer listening sections that use the multiple choice format for questions; shorter sections that use a drag & drop technique for questions and a large collection of “Input Listenings” that require students to input whole words into answer boxes.

Multiple Choice Listening is a collection of listenings with activities that are designed to improve listening skills for those who need intensive practice for examinations, or simply want to upgrade their skills.

Each listening comprises four parts:
1. Pre-listening
2. While-Listening
3. Post-Listening
4. Extra exercises (in both test & practice mode)

Notetaking (drag & drop) utilises the distinctive web technique of allowing users to drag and drop an answer into a predefined space. This is not dissimilar to gap-fill listening tasks found in ESL examinations

Each listening comprises three parts:
1. Pre-listening
2. While-Listening
3. Post-Listening

Notetaking (input) is a collection of shorter listenings. It is similar to gap-fill listening tasks found in ESL examinations, except that, in this format the student types the correct answers in the empty spaces.

The Reading section comprises two main sub-sections.
Task Reading is a series of fully annotated articles that examine various aspects of the world we live in.
Each reading article is supported by four types of quizzes or tasks:
1. Text comprehension.
2. Vocabulary
3. Paraphrasing
4. Summarizing.
5. Automatic email submission

Issues & Personalities are fully annotated articles focusing on issues and personalities in the world today.

Each reading article is supported by three types of quizzes:
1. Text comprehension.
2. Vocabulary
3. Connotation (word association).

Topic areas are remarkably wide e.g.: aspects of business, technology and events in a wide spread of countries. Features include pop-up definitions, article and definition printouts, text-input quizzes and multiple-choice quizzes.

Writing comprises varied examples of how examination-writing tasks need to be practised and tackled.

Pathways to Writing contains 4 modules with a variety of activities. These include traditional quizzes on vocabulary selection and general comprehension. In addition, users are set a writing task that can be mailed from inside the site to an instructor’s email address. Supporting exercises include various rewriting exercises that prepare students for the main writing activity. The texts in each module are liberally annotated, many with graphics to aid the understanding of the lexical item.
The underlying idea, it is claimed, is to improve a student’s writing for examination-type essays where he or she “needs to examine texts on a similar topic with the purpose of actively grabbing language and ideas for immediate reuse. Students work their way through the different activities and use what they have encountered as a springboard for producing their own writing.”

Essay Writing is an area that explores examples of various types of academic essays through the use of models, explanations and alternative texts.
Essays covered include:
1. Argumentative
2. Cause and Effect
3. Compare and Contrast
4. Process

Graphs is a section which deals with the description of graphs, an important feature of the academic module of the IELTS examination.

Describing Graphs is a series of line and bar graphs that provide guidance in understanding and describing graphic representations of data.
Each unit comprises two full alternative models for describing each graph and comprehension quizzes with feedback.

Interactive Graphs is a series of interactive graphs, which provide valuable practice in understanding and answering a variety of graph related examination questions.
The user simply clicks on various parts of a diagram to provide an answer. These could be used to supplement the "Understanding Graphs" unit. There are examples of Line, Bar and Pie graphs and charts.

The Graph Glossary contains almost fifty terms used to describe the movement and position of line graphs, brought to life through a series of animated screens and contextual examples. Features include audio pronunciation of keywords, definitions and example uses.

Business Scenarios is a series of interactive business scenarios that require a formal written response, in the form of, for example, a fax or an email. Students are required to read through the background information of each interactive scenario, and then submit their written task through the text input area provided in each unit.
Help in completing the task is available in “Guidelines” and “Style & Tone”.

This quick survey of the material in Onlearn.biz allows us to see that the website is extremely varied in the types of activities that are offered to students and possesses many of the features that are seen collectively over a large number of EFL/ESL websites. Its use of forms to allow students to send work to instructors is a feature that has been employed in some other web-based educational material but is used here frequently for a range of activities, including sending summaries, essays and formal business writing. A range of web techniques are deployed (e.g.: drag & drop, input, multiple choice, hot spots etc) which make for a well-balanced collection of materials that probably have “something-for-everyone”, unlike some websites that over-concentrate on one or two techniques. As was indicated earlier, the range of content is wide, too, although there is a tendency to deal with technology-related issues. This is especially true in the Input listenings, although this is balanced by the more general topics in Timed Reading.

There are a large number of features that might be included in learning material which are not present in Onlearn.biz. In particular, there is no tracking system and no linkages to a Learning Management System that would record student progress by way of retaining previous scores. There are other examples of courseware that allow student scores to be recorded in an accumulative way and progress bar charts or statistics made available for viewing. Such examples tend to be in courses available on CD ROM or on larger websites. Such systems have value if there is a syllabus underpinning the learning material, so that students are aware that there is a progression in the level of difficulty as they move through different parts of the course. It is only when this is in place that scoring has any real value. Onlearn.biz does allow students to see their score (usually expressed as “You scored X out of 7”) but this appears merely to allow students to get a general sense of how well they are doing in a particular exercise. Maybe it is not realistic to expect Onlearn.biz to have tracking systems in place, as its aim is not to move students through a course, but to give them supplementary practice in a web environment. It seems that Onlearn.biz is not a course as such, so a system that tracks scores would have limited value. However, a tracking system that indicates what material has been visited might be useful. The present reviewer can only speculate that the implementation of such a system would be quite difficult, given that the site is Flash-based.

Likewise, there are no communication tools available with Onlearn.biz such as discussion boards and real-time communication features. Once again, these features would not seem to fit into Onlearn.biz’s purpose of providing free-standing material that supplements and supports what students are doing elsewhere. The rationale for the material in Onlearn.biz appears to be that higher-level students will find it useful for self-directed practice outside their regular course of study (particularly bearing in mind the emphasis given to full feedback). If it is used as part of a wider schedule of study by a language school or college, it is possible for communication tools to be used as an adjunct. It should, also, be remembered (as noted before) that there are many opportunities for learners to send their work to instructors from within Onlearn.biz. This feature occurs in the sections ‘Pathways to Writing’ and ‘Essay Writing’, which encourages the sense that students can be in direct contact with their instructors.

Given the volume and variety of the material, it is useful to examine just one area for the purpose of evaluating its potential usefulness and ascertaining what are the learning theories that underpin its design.

The Longer Passages in the Listening section are designated ‘multiple choice’. Clicking on the main menu takes us to a sub-menu, which appears in two panes alongside the main menu. Clicking from the far right pane on one of four modules takes the user to the start of the listening exercise where Pre-Listening is highlighted by a red underline. An explanation is placed on the Pre-Listening page, indicating what the user is supposed to do and offers advice about how often to listen to the recording. The instructions seem clear and well presented. They are, in fact, standard instructions that appear on all the listening modules in this section. Most interestingly, this page contains an “organiser”, which is a method of pre-empting content and vocabulary. This consists of a panel in the bottom half of the page which itself contains two sides. Students can flip between the two pages to view a limited number of graphics and vocabulary items that will help them anticipate the content of the listening passage. For example, the Listening module on ‘Australian Businesses in China’ contains four pictures (a map of China, a line graph indicating growth, a bar chart showing sharp increases and a wad of paper money), alongside which are the words, ‘China’, ‘growth in China’s economy’, ‘WTO = World Trade Organisation’, ‘Australian businesses’, ‘local and foreign partners’, ‘funds’, ‘rosy growth projections’, plus a set of numbers that indicate a rise. This seems an extremely useful way of preparing students for the audio material, as it sets up expectations, prefigures some of the key concepts, highlights significant lexical items and gives students the opportunity to use the prompts as a springboard for exploring what a recording on Australian businesses in China might contain. This method of encouraging students “to think ahead” fits very much into the mould of an exploratory approach to language learning and is the antithesis of spoon-feeding students.

The main Listening page of the module has questions in large font that can be accessed by horizontal scrolling. For informational websites, the common wisdom is that horizontal scrolling is to be avoided as it disorientates the user. However, the technique seems to work in this case as the questions reflect the linear form of an audio recording. Furthermore, it is only when you have scrolled through to answer the last question that you can see the buttons to click for the answers and a score of how many you answered correctly. In self-directed work, there is always the temptation to simply click on answers, but, at least, in this instance, the ‘answers’ button does not appear immediately. Perhaps, more significantly, additional advice for the user appears on the Listening screen explaining that the best option is to go to the Post-listening page for feedback. This clearly puts the emphasis on student responsibility, which strongly indicates that answers are not the goal of the exercise in and of themselves. As with the vast majority of language exercises on the web, it is always easy to short-circuit learning and merely obtain answers, but Onlearn.biz is very explicit in explaining to students how they can best learn. Once again, this fits very much into an approach to learning that sees knowledge, not as simple transmission, but as the construction of meaning where learner responsibility is vital and ‘personal sense-making’ is what constitutes true learning.

The Post-Listening page offers the recording again (with its options of streamed real media, downloaded real media file or downloaded MP3 file) with a scrollable transcript, which is prominently displayed above the questions. This time the questions will reveal the answers, not simply as right or wrong, but by providing a detailed explanation of why each option is possible or not. This is a very valuable feature as most language exercises on the web still have feedback that rarely rises above ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’. Such an approach is perhaps satisfactory when answers are factual but is highly inadequate when correct answers require an understanding of inferences. The present website, then, scores high marks for the extensive nature of its feedback which is very time-consuming to produce.

The Listening module also contains a separate quiz area that would be completed after the Post-Listening feedback has been received. The quiz comes in two modes: a practice mode where a single question is given after which students move on to the next question and a test mode where answers and a total score are only available after all questions have been seen. The questions are in the form of input boxes where students insert one word that is missing from the sentence. All the items are drawn from the recording that students have just seen and, possibly, followed in the transcript. Feedback in practice mode is once again extensive and, usefully, attention is drawn to significant collocations.

It is important to make a distinction between an author’s intent and actual use of the material. Very often material that looks well-crafted and potentially useful fails to promote learning in the way the creator of the material intended. It has not been possible for the present reviewer to conduct user trials in any sort of systematic way because of the recent nature of the site, although individual English Language learners have commented on various sections of the Onlearn.biz website. It should, also, be borne in mind that much of the material is for strong intermediate learners and above. If weaker students attempted to use some of the material they might flounder because help (in the form of glossaries and explanations) is at a higher level than they are capable of receiving. Indeed, the “help” screens are couched in language that is not accessible to learners below an intermediate level. Since most English language learning websites are pitched at a beginner and pre-intermediate level, it is not a disadvantage that Onlearn.biz is aiming for a different segment of learners.

This website is very much in the nature of supplementary material. It does not claim to be a ‘course’ but simply a collection of interactive materials that could be useful for students attempting examinations (IELTS and TOEFL are specified) and others who want to improve their English for academic and/or professional purposes. Therefore, the important question to ask is how such material might be embedded in any learning situation. One major area of use could be the Self-Access units of language schools, colleges and universities. This would probably work well given the amount of feedback that is given to the learner and the use of forms so that student work could be emailed to instructors and/or tutors associated with the Self-Access unit. The range of activities and variety of content could be appealing in such a context where the frustration factor of doing frequent similar activities is high.

The material could also be used by individual ‘self-starter’ students who are not connected to any organisation but need access to high-quality, interactive material. The submission of work might be a problem in some areas (for example: Pathways to Writing and Business Scenarios), unless an instructor is willing to provide feedback on written work. It might be an idea for Onlearn.biz to offer such a service, although good-quality feedback to student work is notoriously demanding in terms of time.

In addition, the material could be used in the language classroom which would solve the problem of identifying an instructor. Students could easily work on different sections, choosing what content is of immediate interest to them. The instructor would then provide additional guidance, feedback and encouragement. Work could be set for a time outside class and the forms used for delivery of work.

Final Thoughts

Onlearn.biz is an innovative website that contains interesting and varied material. It combines activities that promote language learning using technological techniques that are rarely seen in one place. It has a clearly specified target audience and supplies learning materials that are genuinely interactive. The reviewer found that all the links were working and there were no typographical errors. The ‘look and feel’ of the site makes it memorable and pleasing to the eye, at least in this reviewer’s subjective view. The navigational system is clear, something which is often difficult to achieve in a Flash-based site. There seem to be no ‘bells and whistles’ in the site, which is a definite plus. On the contrary, the use of graphics are used purposely to aid student understanding of vocabulary and context. Overall, it is a ‘user friendly’ site, which has the potential to assist language learning.

Chapelle, C.A. (2001) Computer applications in second language acquisition: Foundations for teaching testing and research. Cambridge: CUP

Conrad, K.B. (1996) CALL-Non-English L2 Instruction. Annual review of Applied Linguistics 16, 158-181

Frizler,K. (1995) The Internet as an educational tool in ESOL Writing Instruction

Krashen, S. (1982) Principles and practices in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.

Tribble, C. (1996) Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Vale, D., Scarino, A., McKay, P., (2002) Pocket ALL. Carlton: Curriculum Corporation

top