Adult Learning Activities & John’s ESL Community

Adult Learning Activities & John’s ESL Community

Adult Learning Activities

www.edlponline.com is the top ranking site. This site is called “Adult Learning Activities”. It has reading, writing, and listening activities, which are theme-based. Themes include: working, law and government, family, school, health & safety, housing, money, science and technology, services, going places, and nature.

Impact -- Distance Education has been revolutionized by the rapid evolution of computers, telecommunications, and electronic learning technologies. Internet-based learning has become a popular and well-accepted methodology for delivering distance-education. Faster and more powerful computers, increased Internet bandwidth, and easy-to-learn training software, along with tightened corporate training budgets, mean Web-based training and distance education are here to stay.

Demographics -- Studies reveal that most distance education students are adults between the ages of 25 and 50, and distance learners are more likely than conventional students to be employed full-time. These statistics mean that sound instructional design in distance education depends on a clear understanding of what factors affect adult learning.

Motivating Elements -- Adults tend to think of themselves as mature, responsible, and independent. Yet, they may feel anxious, even threatened, about a return the classroom, even if that classroom is online. A number of things can be designed into courses and curricula to reduce these student anxieties:

• Gain student attention early
• Focus student attention on the desired outcomes
• Clearly state instructional objectives for each section or lesson
• Assist learners by organizing material into chunks (or logical groups) of information
• Offer frequent feedback and opportunities for learning reinforcement
• Incorporate numerous guided practices in the course
• Adapt complexity of materials and rate of presentation to the probable capacity and experience of the learner
• Provide learning experiences that promote moving information from shot-term to long-term memory

John's ESL Community

www.johnsesl.com is called “John’s ESL Community”. It provides free lessons, games and printable materials. It has reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary, listening and idioms. John's ESL Community now has over 350 activities for students of English. There are games, puzzles, self-study quizzes and much more, all designed to help students improve their English skills. Besides John's ESL Community Site Builder, there are many resources available for teachers including free downloadable class materials. Additional activities and materials are added almost daily.

John's ESL Community began as John's ESL Resources in 1995 and served as a gateway page to other ESL resources on the Internet. At that time, the site was hosted on GeoCities. The move to a domain hosting server opened up new opportunities for John's ESL Community to become a real community for ESL teachers and students. In June of 2002, the John's ESL Site Builder was launched. This service enables ESL/EFL teachers from around the globe to create a class web site complete with readymade activities, all without the need to know HTML or any other programming language.