Gunnar Andersson , Sissel Larsen , Hong Wu Østfold University College, Norway

1. Learning Communication Skills through Non-verbal Interactions and Process Analysis – A None-traditional ICT related Teaching Approach for Teaching Education Gunnar Andersson, Sissel Larsen, Hong Wu Østfold University College, Norway Faculty of Education, Halden Faculty of Engineering, Sarpsborg gunnar.andersson@hiof.no sissel.larsen@hiof.no hong.wu@hiof.no

2. Two major aspects are presenting for this paper: • Exercising and learning communication skills through an acting and reacting play as a none-traditional teaching approach • Using Learning Management System (LMS) to restore the course documents, including students’ work assignments, and generate a virtual classroom for on campus and remote students

3. The current study exemplifies a case of teaching communication topic for education students at Østfold University College • The course itself is a traditional course related to the organizational topics, named as “Communication, leadership and interactions” • Targeting for regional remote students, approximately 1/3 of entire class of 30. • Focusing on exercising and practicing on communication and interaction skills for students • This will be undertaken and practiced by the stage and acting play with process analysis to follow with

4. The organization of course • A combination of • face-to-face teaching lectures • individual study (including literature review and assignments) • project based teamwork and self-conducted studies • Every student has to contribute his/her efforts to the project teamwork, such as, • acting and reacting play on video clip • written analysis documents (reports and assignments) • oral presentation

5. Teaching communication and interactions through stage and acting play • A background description on the persons or actors in the case (their positions and roles in acting) • A situation description that includes circumstances, where and when this happened • Topic: Related to the syllabus or theories, for example, different expresses or signals on lack of communication? • Conflict: What is a conflict? Wherever more than two persons at the same place, there must be a potential for different or contra-dictionary wishes • A single person’s position and role will always motivate his/her actions

6. Working process and methods • The case through an acting play lasts normally 10 minutes per a session • For multi-aspects learning effects, it is expected that every group member will act differently and play as vary actors/roles in such a communicative situation • The intention of the stage and acting play is not necessarily for students to solving the misunderstanding or conflict, but demonstrate and understand the happening of such a situation • An opponent group is involved in so that the interaction process can be demonstrated “alive”, especially when a “everything went wrong” case was occurred and discussed

7. Video session for acting play record • A video session in 3-5 minutes to record an acting play • The students will analyze what was happened in this video session • They will also summarize their analysis for other students • Their opponent group will make the same analysis (but might be same or different views or conclusions)

8. Technology application and media based learning approaches – new openings and paradigm • It is topic and case focused, but curriculum based reading • It deals with pictures, situations and non-verbal communication with short and repeated video sessions • It consists of a number of written documents, mainly analysis reports and evaluations as the basic corn for the final exam • It opens and needs changing options during the process (video sessions) and interactions (the opponent group’s analysis)

9. The Need of Flexibility for Learners – Experiences and Evaluations A survey summary on course evaluations throughout course period

10. The Need of Flexibility for Learners – Experiences and Evaluations A survey summary on course evaluations throughout course period

11. A great number of students work mostly t home and very few work at workplace • Gathering seems to be an important event, also as working place and available time for working with lectures • Other places such as libraries seem not to be the most common place for working with lectures • Students tend to work gradually more and more in evening or weekend, and less in ordinary working hours • Students tend to make greater and greater efforts for their lecture work • Stduents’ expectations to the course were best at starting, but down gradually until the last evaluation

12. A summary of comments from the course evaluations

13. A summary of comments from the course evaluations

14. A summary of suggested improvement from the course evaluations

15. The Importance of Acting Play for Learning Communication Skills • Citations from the student surveys about acting play: • “Exciting and interesting lectures in communication” • “Exciting (but also scared) with video filming, which is a good assignment for us” • “Lectures are fun and beneficial, especially acting play part” • “I think lecture in “communication” part was pretty good” • Acting play seems to be the most exciting, but also efficient approach for learning communication skills for students

16. LMS in Non-verbal Interaction Based Learning Approach – Openings and Challenges • Openings • This LMS applied non-verbal interaction learning pattern provides new openings for pedagogical experiments and debates. The study also opens a possibility to combine the fulltime and part-time students to attending a same class and work together. • In a pedagogical aspect, this will also create a wider and vary composition of an online community, and activate the class debates and learning processes • Challenges • Purely technical hurdling of LMS • The proper balancing of LMS application and the lecture content