Student Engagement with an Online Preenrolment English Course at a Japanese University

Abstract

The authors manage an English language course for high school students who successfully apply for early enrolment to a Japanese university each year. The course is noncredit bearing and although encouraged, participation is at the students’ volition. Its primary aim is to help students maintain their English language skills in the four or five months before university lectures start in early April. In keeping with the university's practice of utilising technology in the classroom, the majority of the course is online, using the open-source Moodle LMS. The online portion of the course includes interaction with their future classmates and upperclassmen (currently enrolled at the university) in asynchronous forum discussions. In this way, too, students create their own course content. The success of such a course depends on the level of student activity, and as such the authors have an interest in maximising this. This paper will describe the key features of the 2017 iteration of the course and the extent to which students engaged with it. The results of a post-course student survey will be analysed to understand students' opinions of the course, and the main impediments to student engagement. Based on these, some possible changes for the 2018 version will be described.