Armenian K-12 and Higher Education vs Horizon Report 2014 

Comparing Armenian higher education and K-12 to the Horizon reports, the following points have been highlighted

v Rethinking the roles of the teachers

I consider the role of the teachers in Armenia won’t change, because, teachers were, are and will be the center of the classroom and nothing can make them concede their place to the student centered classrooms to make them autonomous learners. Therefore they should allow students to change their roles from consumers to producers.

v Shift to Deeper Learning Approaches

In Armenia students mainly make use of old, “Soviet” books and teachers mainly focus on grammar-translation method where students only read and translate texts. Classes do not have any authentic materials or interesting tasks and activities. However, it is not our teachers’ fault, because traditional way of teaching still exists and teachers either do not know about new methods and techniques that can be very useful in acquiring this or that material or probably they know, but simply do not want to prepare lesson plans, to create and design activities, to put efforts in what they do. Instead they’d better stick to their initially established way of teaching and “do not bother their teaching routine.”

When teaching, we do not want our students focus only on learning language as it is, but alongside to solve problems, to collaborate, to develop critical thinking skills, create and be engaged in the learning process that will help them to get more experienced and acknowledgeable. During their life time they will face many problems demanding solutions, that’s why schools should pay attention to this fact by implementing authentic situations into the school curriculums in order to prepare them to the real life problems and be able to find solutions and therefore  easily to be integrated into the community.

v Increasing Use of Hybrid Learning Designs

It is difficult to speak about technology, because schools do not want to implement new methods of teaching, moreover new technological tools that are so important and efficient in learning language. Therefore speaking about technology in Armenia is not as easy as it seems. Schools in Armenia do not only use technology, moreover they are not equipped with modern devices, like projector, computers, even Internet access. Students in Armenia are not aware of such concept as working, developing and improving their skills via new tech tools. If such things are happening in cities and towns, imagine what’s going on in rural areas of our country. Nowadays, in most of the rural areas Internet is a great finding. In case of existing it serves as a tool for getting into social networks. Though many new tech tools and applications won’t work in Armenia mainly in rural areas nowadays, it is quite useful and important for teachers to know about them and in case of possibility to use, however the majority do not know about these wonderful resources that can help them and be beneficial for their students not only from the language learning perspective, but also from the perspective of being knowledgeable of tech tools and their implication in our life.

v Creating Authentic Learning Opportunities

It is quite important to create authentic learning environment in EFL classroom settings, because authentic learning encourages and helps students to occur and bring about real life experiences, and let outside world creep into inside world in the frames of classroom. This type of learning is created through real life tasks, simulation games that facilitate and stimulate students and enable to connect directly with the real world. In Armenia this type of learning as well as others does not exist.

v Gaming

Nowadays many students play computer and video games. These games can serve as a tool guiding them to improve their learning skills and develop their 21^st century skills, life skills. Among the main skills are promoting collaboration and problem solving, developing critical thinking skills, ability to quickly make a decision which nowadays is very important and demanding, but difficult. Therefore, the role of the teacher is to show the reverse side of the coin – of playing games-that can provide students with knowledge and skills that can be implicated for educational and life purposes.

v “Flipped classroom”

Flipped classroom is a new model aimed at helping teacher to organize time spent in and outside of classroom and pass the ownership of learning to students. In this type of model class time is transformed into a social space and allocated to project-based learning where students collaborate, work team wise to solve real-world problems and challenges, and therefore gain deeper understanding of the subject authentically.

v Learning Analytics

In Armenia, EFL classrooms and other classrooms comprise more or less 30 students. It is quite difficult for the teacher to track all of them simultaneously , therefore it would be reasonable to make use of learning analytics where teacher would be able to track students throughout their learning process, their overall performance, challenges, dropout rates, due assignments and so forth. Based on the data collected teacher would be able to offer students help and improve their current learning position.

To conclude, it is quite necessary for English teachers in Armenia to completely change their way of teaching, integrate new methods and techniques and discover the world of new high technological tools, because we live in the world where the education is gradually being digitalized and therefore to share knowledge to students by using the new and efficient ways of teaching.