5.3 Discussions on Lecturers’ Roles in MALL
5.3.2.3 The Role of Being Creative
addressing language learning skills may stimulate learners to maximize their vocabulary learning. As pointed out by the interviewees in the current study, there were two benefits that creativity could offer to students: making lessons more comprehensible and stimulating students’ emotions. Some interviewees expressed that the more lecturers creative, the easier lessons would be, which facilitated lesson comprehensibility. Moreover, integrating traditional materials with mobile technology made EFL learners become more engaged in the lessons.
From students’ illustration about their MALL lecturers’ creative work, the study found that lecturers at HUFI often used Power Point to introduce new lessons, provided online assignments whose results could be showed immediately after finished, employed game online like Kahoot, showed videos whose contains were correlated directly to the lesson. It can be inferred that lecturers at HUFI use simple technological tools or existing websites or familiar applications to support mobile learning;
notwithstanding, they strived to diversify mobile technologies to make English learning more attractive. There was one activity an interviewee highly evaluated was asking students to use mobile devices to record their role-play. This activity could be seen as relatively complicated because students had to collaborate to act, to edit their videos, to add theme songs, or to add special effects if necessary. Through this activity, students would understand more functions of mobile tools. The creativity of lecturers can be concluded that it does not always require teachers to employ too convoluted technological knowledge, it can be the creativity of designing tasks for learners.
Through such tasks, students themselves are able to explore more functions and enhance their technological knowledge substantially. Montrieux et al. (2015) labelled two types of MALL teachers: instrumental teachers and innovative teachers.
Instrumental teachers are those who maintain the traditional way of teaching, even while using portable devices and they stuck in utilizing handheld tools without a
fundamental change in teaching and learning. They consider mobile devices as “book behind glass” (p. 14). In comparison, innovative teachers strive to approach learning- centered method by integrating educational applications in their classes. The most important thing is they use mobile devices to transform learning which extend teaching and learning practices; therefore, this type of teachers can be related to the highest level of technology integration. Furthermore, innovative teachers also provide authentic learning experiences and share knowledge in a media-rich environment. As proposed by Montrieux et al. (2015), the evidence found in this current study points to the fact that lecturers at HUFI intend to be instrumental rather than innovative lecturers.
Specifically, PowerPoint is a simple tool to deliver content and make it look bigger, or more colorful. Online assignments, on the other hand, are existing design on MyNG website which lecturers do not need to design anything. Correspondingly, using existing videos related to content of the lessons also required lecturers to edit nothing.
Kahoot which seems to be creative but for students, they just need to choose or write down correct answers on mobile devices instead of writing on paper. All of mentioned tools are not enough to “transform learning” as stated by Montrieux et al. (2015).
However, the lecturer required his/her students to record their role-play by mobile devices could be seen as a relatively innovative lecturer. As analyzed previously, this activity asked students to apply various knowledge and skills in both language and technology to complete a video. Firstly, this activity was a learning-centered method, not teaching-method; secondly, it transformed learning because students did not stick to learning materials; thirdly, it provided learners authentic learning experiences because they had to apply their language in real contexts. However, it could not be approved as a media-rich environment. Students did not “live” in a learning environment where they could use various platforms or mobile devices to communicate with others. Findings of Morgana and Shrestha (2018) showed that more than 80% of the students were expecting their teachers to allow students to create materials and
presentations with iPads, such as creating presentations, creating short videos, publishing review on the school websites, creating an e-magazine, etc. In conclusion, MALL lecturers not only try to be creative in their teaching process, but they also should encourage their students to employ mobile technological skills into their learning process. Ali et al. (2018) contributed a new finding to the field by suggesting that the more students involved and concentrated on learning, the more innovative teachers will teach their learners. It can be implied that the creativity of MALL lecturers has a close association with students’ involvement and concentration. MALL lecturers need students’ positive perceptions as a promising factor to encourage them to teach more innovatively.