i love barkingsheep

I undertook a Korean online course for this assignment. At first I was going to find an online course that taught people how to play a guitar, but because the guitar that I have ordered had not arrived in stores yet, I was not able to continue with that idea and so instead, I chose a language course, this is because I really enjoy learning new languages as I love the idea of being multilingual and learning more languages would really help in my future career. Out of all the different languages I could choose from I chose Korean. Mainly due to the fact that next semesters some university friends and I will be undertaking a Korean language course at TAFE and it would be beneficial if I was able to get a head start. Another reason I chose to do Korean was because I will be travelling to
Korea with high school friends in 2008 and it would help if I knew some basic everyday phrases. Therefore from this course, my objective was to learn basic phrases and vocabulary that would be used in everyday communication. I expected the course to be easy to navigate with simple instructions as it would then also be beneficial for people who are not too technologically advanced.

Overall I learnt a fair bit from this course, I was particularly interested in two chapters, chapter ten and chapter twenty-one. I enjoyed learning chapter ten as it is a lesson on how to order food when you are at a restaurant, and because I love eating, it made this chapter even more interesting. Chapter 21 focused on introducing yourself to other people which I thought would come into good use in the future. I was quite motivated in continuing with this online course for a few reasons, on being the website layout as it is well organised, for example, there is a contents page where it lists the chapters and its’ heading, so the whole course was not just in one big chunk. Each chapter layout was the same which also made it easier to use, and there isn’t much colour meaning there is less distraction and there is no bright colour so my eyes did not hurt from looking at the computer screen for so long. Also the audio came with a flash animation which made it more interesting and the audio was very clear and at a slow pace making it easier to pronounce. The website provided contact details which is good, so if a problem arises, learners are able to contact the administrator. Another feature that caught my eyes was the language panel on the side, learners from different countries are able to complete this online course in their native language as it provides the course to be changed into different languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German and many more.

It would be helpful if the course provided feedback or if there were small tests at the end of each chapter so learners could know how much they really learnt and how much they remembered. For a few chapters, the audio and the and animation were a little out of time which was quite frustrating at times, but this was only for around three chapters so the majority is in time.

This learning style was very different to what I am use to. Although I enjoyed learning online as there is no pressure and I was able to learn at my own pace and whenever I wanted to, I still prefer face-to-face learning where I am able to receive feedback, and see whether I am making any progress or not. But learning online makes it a lot harder and it’ll be interesting to compare the online course to an actual face-to-face course I will be attending next year. All in all, I do recommend this online course to anyone!