Thierry Mocktail team

April 20, 2025 / 0 Comments

ONL Topic 2 : sharing

I’m often in a position where I must share my lessons with my colleagues. There is often a rotation within our language department, which means that we are obliged to prepare courses for a few semesters and then hand them over to other colleagues.

The problems occurring are numerous, even if culture of sharing among teachers is more frequent in Sweden, where transparency is a way of life, compared to France :  afraid of being judged and getting a bad feedback, too busy to take time to explain to colleagues, different pedagogic or way of seeing the problems, jealousy between colleagues, a certain reluctance to share work that has taken a long time to complete, lack of encouragement from the people in charge…

It would be nice to have some guidelines or tools to try and solve these problems.Like for instance having a common tool (platform, teaching blog) where we could go and contribute, and gives advice or feedback on everybody’s documents.As a native French speaker, I often come across language mistakes in documents written by my fellow teachers of french who do not have French as their mother tongue. And it’s not always easy to tell them without appearing to criticize them.But it would be another tool, implying an overload of work (when we have already many digital tools like platforms to take care of).

Having workshop where every teacher shares its own work or it’s way of working with tips, advice could be another alternative (we have started to do that last term and it was interesting to see how other teachers reflect about their own teaching, and the methods they use). But it requires a willingness and a trust of everybody.

Another interesting aspect of this topic was to understand the world of licensed resources and be able to always stand on the right side when using material on internet (pictures as far as I am concerned) . A thought-provoking exercise.

April 19, 2025 / 0 Comments

ONL Topic 1 : Online participation &digital literacies, Thierry’s reflection

As a French teacher at a university in Sweden, I’m faced with some interesting challenges when it comes to using digital tools in teaching, not least because the courses are open to everyone, of all ages, and I often have classes in which the ages range from 18 to 78 (my oldest student).

In my day-to-day work at Lunds University, we are using more and more digital tools, whether in on-campus courses or in distance learning courses (which are an increasingly important part of our teaching). There are a lot of challenges between mastering these tools (interactive platform like the one we use, Canvas, but also zoom, power Point presentation, etc.), which requires full training for us teachers- which we don’t always have access to – and spending a lot of time just using them, and the way in which students grasp them.

Even though Sweden has long been ahead (compared for instance to France where I come from) in terms of technology (mobile phones and computers were part of Swedish daily life when I arrived in Sweden in the 90s, whereas they were almost non-existent in France, especially telephones), and students of all ages are used to these tools, using them can still be complex for teachers and students alike.

The digital development can sometimes go a little too fast, with engineers creating tools that are very, or even too, powerful. And we teachers can sometimes only use a small percentage of these tools (due to lack of time, lack of training, some reluctance sometimes due to the lack of digital capabilities, or the fear of just not be able to use them properly), while students expect us to master them. What’s more, many students today work more often with their phone or a tablet than with a computer, which makes the teacher’s job even harder.

What’s more, we use these tools directly during lessons, for exercises or online texts (to avoid making photocopies), which inevitably creates downtime to explain to some people how to access the right pages or click on the right link. Not to mention the distraction that a computer and its content can cause during a class.

In short, the digital world is changing at breakneck speed, and we teachers have to work hard to keep up. That’s why this course is so interesting!