Local students from poor backgrounds in remote areas of Taiwan have an opportunity to join an e-learning program with foreign students thanks to a public university in Taipei.
The E-Tutor program, which was put forward by Cathy Weng Yang Sz-Chien, an Associate Professor from the Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education from the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (Taiwan Tech) in 2016, has been running for the past two years with fruitful results, The CommonWealth Magazine reported.
The program aims to enhance motivation and effective learning of Taiwanese pupils who live in remote areas through the use of information technology.
At present, Taiwan Tech has lined up eight primary schools, providing e-Learning classes for traditional subjects including Chinese, English and mathematics. What is more exciting are unique cultural courses given by foreign students of Taiwan Tech.
Grace, an Indonesian student from the Department of Architecture, met her learning buddy Huang Yu-Ho, a primary six pupil from the Municipal Guanshan Guomin Elementary School, about three months ago.
Learning that Huang loved watching movies, Grace designed classes that allow learning English through movies with him. Over the past 10 weeks, they watched Doctor Strange, Madagascar and many others.
Huang, who had been shy and not able to speak much at the beginning, became more able to communicate with Grace as the English improved and asked about her country.
The pupil said only after joining the E-Tutor program did he realize he could learn English from English. It opened his horizons as in school his teachers used Chinese to teach him the foreign language.