Let the snowball to grow bigger! --Vialogues

The tool I'd like to talk about today really blows my mind thanks to functional innovation. It's common to see video-lesson sharing on the internet, right? People are able to leave their comments below the video, isn't it? What if these two elements are fused into one thing? 'Vialogues' may be at play providing a space for as many students in collaborative learning. 

Let's see what do we have on this page 😍😍

https://www.vialogues.com/ 

(Home page)

(Video page)

In short, Vialogues is a platform using educational videos to trigger discussion to provoke thinking. If you come up with some thoughts when you see a frame, type the idea in 'New Comment' box and post it, then your comment will show up on the right attached with the timing of this frame. 

☝☝For some videos, the moderators may create quizzes for the video for the content of specific frames (overlapping sound: Vialogues has a noticeable number of Spanish videos, interesting😲).

In the quick guide below, you can learn to create your own video for discussion apart from comments in videos. Don't skip it 😜

Language learning through collaboration

As long as the content of videos are connected to language, they can be applied to language learning. 

(Credit: Blogin)

Sometimes teachers may concern that discussion can be easily conducted in a group of several people, yet it might be hard to receive responses due to the shyness of some students if the question is thrown to the whole class. Nonetheless, this online tool can solve this problem so that everyone who wants to share their ideas or questions can express their opinion without any concern. 

Basically in Vialogues, we look to other learners as resources. However, it is slightly different from the traditional collaboration, where the size of the learner group might be small, a class of 20 to 30, or even bigger if the video is shown to the public. 

The more learners accessing to certain videos and give comments, the more insights from a different perspective we get. Similar to the snowball effect, the more comments come into the snowball as inspiration, the more new ideas may be generated. 

Huge potential during pandemic to foster language learning

We are at a special time to experience blended learning when lectures need to be given online. In this regard, why not upload the lesson onto Vialogues, where language acquisition can be achieved through: 

1. Raising questions or supplements before offline class

We often finish online lectures before seminars and reflect the knowledge on classroom tasks. WAIT! Have you ever thought about what to do if you were confused by some point mentioned in the lecture? Ask the teacher after class? I guess it would affect your tasks. 

Vialogues provides a chance for students to leave their questions at specific timing corresponding to a certain slide perhaps, so that teachers can receive feedback from students, rather than one-way output (other feedback like understanding of some concepts, answers to teacher's question). 

In this way, collaboration is carried out while one student asks a question, and other students answer to his or her doubt to scaffold learning. Besides, the process actually trains learners' reading and writing skills because they input others' words and output their thoughts.

2. In-depth discussion during the seminar

As students may have a heated discussion in the comment section before the lesson, it saves a lot of time for the teacher to be aware of students' situations and summarize their questions then provide answers. In doing so, the whole class have more time to discuss the more insightful questions. 

limitations

😱Not for live discussion!!! OMG!!!

Why do I say that Vialogues does not have the function of real-time discussion? Because no live chatbox is provided and comments are shown up in light with the time of a certain frame in the video instead of the time the comment is posted, which consequently makes learners hard to discuss with others while watching the video. 

By this I mean, when you come up with some idea, you can only leave your thought at a certain time. Other people usually don't notice your comment or understand it until they get to this frame. Generally, it's hard to distinguish the latest comments from groupmates because they are not in a real-time sequence. Our group felt frustrated with it at the beginning and the conversation was really a mess. 😂 Later we continue our talk at 00:00, but obviously that's not what the developer of Vialogues looks for.