53

Summer Session 2019：Innovation
Ross Eric Miller
This paper goes over the innovations that took place for Summer Session
2019, a two-week intensive program for first-year students in the Department
of International Liberal Arts. After a brief discussion of the changes in learning
environment created by a new BYOD program, modifications to the program
utilizing concepts of Blended Learning are described. The results of a student
survey are also presented and discussed. This paper concludes with thoughts
on what contributed to the success of this Summer Session.

Introduction
Beginning with the start of the 2017 school year, the Department of International Liberal
Arts at Otemon Gakuin University implemented a new curriculum for its incoming first-year
students. With the goal of developing global citizens with not only foreign-language skills, butalso a deep understanding of the role culture plays in communication, the first year of thiscurriculum is heavily focused on English language learning. At the conclusion their ﬁrst year, allstudents in the department are expected to participate in one of two study abroad options: a fourweek program in Australia or a two-week/four-week program held on the island of Cebu in thePhilippines.
In an eﬀort to capitalize on the English lessons taught in their ﬁrst semester（Spring）andto give students a taste of what study abroad might be like; the new curriculum provides for an
opportunity to

study abroadin Japan. This opportunity takes the form of an intensive two-

week Summer Session course that is taught in late August/early September. Over 10 teachingdays, students experience 45 hours of instruction, which is double the number of contact hours
for most classes taught in a 15-week semester.
In the summer of 2019, the third iteration of this program was taught. The background,general design and delivery of this course over the ﬁrst two years has been discussed elsewhere（see papers by Hara and Thornton in this volume). This paper looks at the changes made in2019 and goes over the results of a survey completed by students at the conclusion of this course.

54This paper concludes with a concept for facilitating innovation in teaching.

Summer Session 2019
As explained in other papers in this volume, from its onset, Summer Session was intended
to somewhat mimic the experiences students could expect to have when they study abroad.
Therefore, a conscious eﬀort was made to have diversity in teaching staﬀ. For 2019, most obvious
were the individual diﬀerences in varieties of English: North American, Australian, and non-native
varieties taught by Japanese instructors ﬂuent in English. Other diﬀerences included educational
background, experience, and familiarity with using technology in teaching. Four out of the ﬁveteachers had experience teaching at least one previous Summer Session. Table 1 lists some of thecharacteristics of the ﬁve people who taught Summer Session 2019.

Table１．Variables among teaching staﬀ for Summer Session 2019.
Full-Time orPart-Time

Prior Summer
Sessions
TaughtParticipationin Planning
Sessions for
2019

Experienceteaching
thesestudents

NativeLanguage

Teacher 1

FT

2

Yes

No

North
AmericanEnglishTeacher 2

FT

2

Yes

Yes

Japanese

Teacher 3

FT

1

Yes

Yes

Japanese

Teacher 4

PT

1

No

No

North
AmericanEnglishTeacher 5

PT

0

No

No

AustralianEnglishBYOD
The biggest change for Summer Session 2019 over previous years was a change inenvironment. For 2019, this program was to be taught at the new campus in Sojiji. Anotherenvironmental change was one of computer access. In previous years, there had been noaccess to computer classrooms, so technology use by students could not be expected. However,
beginning with the 2019 school year, all incoming ﬁrst-year students were expected to have theirown computers as part of a newly implemented

bring your own device(BYOD）program. Ifthey didn t already own one, students were required to purchase laptop computers upon theirSummer Session 2019：Innovation

55

matriculation to the university and they were expected to have those devices charged and readyto use in their classes. This was a program we wished to capitalize upon as we began to prepare
for the 2019 Summer Session program Innovation

Innovation
In 2019, Summer Session was redesigned to take advantage of the BYOD program that thestudents had grown used to during their ﬁrst semester classes. The end result was a blend of inclass interaction and online engagement.
been described as

Blended Learning

is a relatively new term that has

a coherent design approach that openly assesses and integrates the strengthsof face-to-face and online leaning to address worthwhile educational goals(Garrison & Vughan,

2008, p. x). More generally, blended learning refers to a learning environment where students
have opportunities for both face-to-face（F2F）and computer mediated interactions. However,while there is no commonly agreed upon definition as to what it means for the practitioner（Riley et al., 2014; Tshabalala, Ndeya-Ndereya, & Merwe, 2014), there is acceptance that blended
learning comes in many forms（Picciano, 2009).

Blend for Summer Session 2019
Our goal in taking advantage of the BYOD program was to create a learning environment
where students could not only access information anytime/anywhere, but also actively use theirdevices in active collaboration in and creation of projects. This was accomplished through achange in the way material was presented to students and a change in the project-work thatstudents spent a third of their class-time on.

Materials
In previous years, materials to be used in class that had been prepared by teachers werecollected and printed into a notebook that was distributed to students in the ﬁrst class periodof Summer Session. With this year, in an eﬀort to give students anytime/anywhere access to allmaterials related to Summer Session, a website, which had been created for previous iterationsof this program, was enhanced using the new Google Sites. Through the use of tinyurl.com, asimple web address was created for easy access: tinyurl.com/oguss2019. In 2019, the notebook
was digitized, modiﬁed, and placed online.

56

The homepage to the Summer Session website contained an orientation video, links to
Week1/Week2 classes, a link to the homework page, and a link to pages containing project
information. The website itself contained pages individualized for each teacher s learningmaterials under headings for Week 1 and Week 2 classes. There was also a navigation bar
at the top of each screen that allowed for students/faculty to easily navigate to their desired
page. Instructions for major parts of the program were all online, presented in the form of text/
screencasts/screenshots. Presenting information in this way served two purposes: it provided all
students with the same messaging and it provided the teaching faculty with a common reference
to use as they worked with their students on their individual lessons and program-wide projectwork. Figure 1 shows the Program s homepage.

Figure１．Summer Session Homepage: tinyurl.com/oguss2019. Screenshot courtesyof the author.

Projects
As with previous Summer Sessions, third period was set aside for project work. On thesurface projects were designed to foster collaborative and communicative skills in addition todeveloping computer related skills. Individually, task completion also required some reﬂection on
Japan and Japanese culture, especially that which might be of interest to non-Japanese.

Summer Session 2019：Innovation

57

Project１：Create a theme-based trip through Japan
This project, which had previously been completed as a poster presentation was changed to
one using PowerPoint. In it, student groups had to decide on a theme-based trip through Japan.
The

theme

as up to the student groups to decide, but by pursuing a theme, students wererequired evaluate possible destinations critically as they sought to include appropriate stops
that were truly representative of their chosen themes. For communication, collaboration, andthe facilitation of group-work, students were shown how they could use one of the aﬀordancesof Office 365 and create one PowerPoint file that could be shared among all group members.
Through this feature, all members of the group could work on actively building the presentation
at the same time, with other members changes/additions showing up in real time on eachindividual s screen. On the ﬁfth day（Friday), groups made presentations to the rest of the class
where they received comments and feedback.

Project２：Create a video highlighting
For the last several years,

Cool Kansai

Cool Japan

has been an advertising catchphrase forcommercials promoting Japan to inbound tourism. Even OGU s Department of Global JapaneseStudies has a

Cool Japan

program of study. Capitalizing on students familiarity with thisphrasing, the second project asked students to create their own videos, only they had to narrow
their focus to Cool Kansai. Parameters for the videos were as follows:
Length between 90 and 120 secondsContents include 8 or more scenes
Videos must be captured by students own devices
Final videos must include a voice track, background music, and text or subtitles.

This project work was scheduled for the second week of instruction, but students were
informed of the required contents during the ﬁrst week so that they would have more time torecord their own videos.
From the planning stage all the way through to implementation, there was some faculty
concern about not being able to suitably instruct students in the creation of a video. There wasalso the realization that as students were coming to classes with a variety of devices, there could
be no expectation that they all had familiarity with（or even possessed）video editing software.
To facilitate this project for both faculty and students, a free video editor, Open Shot, whichis available for both the Windows and Macintosh computer platforms, was recommended as apossible software tool to use for the creation of this video. A total of six screencasts were created58

to provide a visual example of how to complete the project. These were uploaded to the Summer
Session website. They covered transferring video/audio ﬁles from smartphones to the cloud or acomputer, adding ﬁles to Open Shot, adding text and captions, and editing in Open Shot.
All students were required to submit a video in order to make sure that all students actively
participated in the content creation. However, a group aspect was also added to this project.
Groups were composed of up to 4 students and each student had to upload at least 4 mini-videos
to a shared folder for the group. Students were free to use any videos from that shared folder
in their ﬁnal project. By being able to draw from the same pool of video resources, it was hopedthat individuals would focus less on any perceived（lack of）quality of their own videos and moreon the creative process of making the best possible video using the same resources as the otherstudents in the group. On the day of submission, the best video from each group was chosen by
the groups and that information was relayed to their teacher.
For the ﬁnal class period of Summer Session, all the students were gathered in WIL Hall.
The videos chosen as best from all the groups from each class had been uploaded to a YouTube
playlist. These 35 videos were played on the three giant screens located there. This gave
students the opportunity to view videos from groups in other classes in addition to those they
had already seen. Based on students audible reactions to the various videos, it was apparent thatthey were interested in watching the videos that other students had made.

Student Survey
At the conclusion of Summer Session 2019, students were asked to complete a 10-item survey
related to their participation in this program. The survey was conducted through Microsoft
Forms. Students accessed the survey on their smart phones through a QR code projected on
the big screens. The survey was not anonymous as identifying information was used to conﬁrm
attendance in this ﬁnal session. Responses were collected from 143 students.

Results
Tables 1 through 4 show results students self-perceptions regarding their effort andenjoyment throughout the program in general and about the two projects speciﬁcally. The scale
for these items ranged from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Group names indicate the diﬀerent
classes the students were assigned to throughout the session.

Summer Session 2019：Innovation

59

Table１．How much did you enjoy/like Summer Session？
Group（n)MeanStd. Deviation

Philippines（26)

8.30

1.61

Brazil（35)

8.22

2.14

Netherlands（27)

8.14

2.17

India（29)

8.06

1.85

Nigeria（26)

7.84

1.51

The mean average of all the groups was 8.12 with a standard deviation of 1.87. A one-way
ANOVA found no statistically signiﬁcant diﬀerences between groups（Ｆ＝.233，ｐ＝.919).

Table２．How much eﬀort did you put into your classes for Summer Session？
Mean

Std. Deviation

India（29)Group（n)

8.51

1.30

Netherlands（27)

8.33

1.59

Philippines（26)

8.23

1.65

Brazil（35)

8.05

2.15

Nigeria（26)

7.96

1.77

The mean average of all the groups was 8.21 with a standard deviation of 1.72. A one-way
ANOVA found no statistically signiﬁcant diﬀerences between groups（Ｆ＝.459，ｐ＝.765).

Table３．How much did you like making the group PowerPoint for Project 1？
Group（n)MeanStd. Deviation

India（29)

8.24

1.68

Philippines（26)

7.50

1.84

Netherlands（27)

7.48

2.08

Brazil（35)

7.37

2.38

Nigeria（26)

7.08

2.31

The mean average of all the groups was 7.54 with a standard deviation of 2.10. A one-way
ANOVA found no statistically signiﬁcant diﬀerences between groups（Ｆ＝.1.201，ｐ＝.313).

Table４．How much did you like making theGroup（n)Cool Kansai

video for Project 2？

Mean

Std. Deviation

India（29)

8.31

1.56

Brazil（35)

8.23

2.07

Nigeria（26)

7.42

2.39

Philippines（26)

7.31

2.75

Netherlands（27)

7.19

2.40

60

The mean average of all the groups was 7.73 with a standard deviation of 2.27. A one-way
ANOVA found no statistically signiﬁcant diﬀerences between groups（Ｆ＝1.663，ｐ＝.162).
Regarding these four items, additional statistical analyses were performed to see to what
extent these responses correlated to each other. There was a relatively strong Pearson scorrelation when looking at students self-perceptions of effort spent during Summer Session
2019 and their enjoyment of the program, with r of .607（ｐ＜.0001). In isolation, there were
statistically significant Pearson s correlations between student effort and how much students
enjoyed making the two diﬀerent projects. For Project 1, the r was .325（ｐ＜.0001）and for
Project 2, it was .437（ｐ＜.0001). Similar results were seen when looking at enjoyment, with
Projects 1 and 2 showing moderate correlations of r at .428 and .439 respectively, also withｐ＜.0001.
The ﬁrst open-ended question on the survey to pretend that they were working at Open
Campus and were asked by a visiting high school student,

What is Summer Session？ . The

following are a sampling of student responses:
Summer session is a insensitive workshop in two weeks and we will learn English for
preparing to go for overseas study abroad.
It is most important thing in summer vacation.
コミュニーケーション能力が上がり、人とも話せる機会が増える。そうすると自分の英語力
だけではなく、人間性としても成長できる。
これから海外に行った時などに使える英語が楽しく学べる！
I will answer that summer session is very fantastic!

A second open-ended question asked students what they thought was the most memorable
part of Summer Session 2019. Out of 143 responses, 43 students（30%）speciﬁcally mentioned the
Cool Kansai video and 18（12.5%）mentioned group projects and the PowerPoint presentation（Project 1). All five teachers were mentioned by name for specific lessons they had taught
during the session. Social skills such as talking with classmates and making new friends werealso frequently mentioned. The following are three examples of this type of entry:
The most memorial thing is communicate with classmates. I didn t have opportunities totalk with them in spring semester. I could enjoy classes with them!
I remember that I was able to learn with students happily.
I talked with my friends about Japanese society.

Some comments that reﬂected a possible impact Summer Session had on students approachSummer Session 2019：Innovation61

to language learning in general are reﬂected by statements such as:
I will remember to state my opinions.
I will remember that motivation is the best important thing to learn English. Lisa taught
us this.
Importance to speak English from myself.

The third open-ended item asked students to write a ﬁnal message to their primary teacher.
This was a required item, but there were no requirements about comment length. Out of 143
responses, only 8（5.6%）were general thankyous. The remaining 135（94.4%）students
included speciﬁcs about their teacher, Summer Session, or their intention to continue studying
English. As examples, one entry intended for each teacher has been included here:
To Ayami, Thank you for teaching to me about Japanese culture and new vocabulary.
I gained the new knowledges and passion because of your class! I m looking forward to
studying with you in the Autumn semester!
Lisa!! I like Lisa is the best teacher in summer session and My class teacher. Thank you!! I
try to studying English more.
Megumi. Thank you for two weeks. I had a good time. I m glad I did a presentation. It
was diﬃcult to speak using English. But this class was very fun! It was good in your class!
Thank you!!
Dear Ross, I could not only enjoy your class but also learn many important things. I ll try
everything when I go abroad. I hope you to keep your health.
Ms. Zoe, Thank you for teaching us English more deeply. Thanks to you, I felt that
English was more interesting. And did you want to use English in the future.

Discussion
Results from the survey indicate that the innovations introduced in Summer Session 2019were successful. It would be understandable if a 2-week intensive program taught in the middleof summer vacation might not be approached with much enthusiasm. However, when it came toenjoyment, a mean average of 8.12 out of 10 indicates that the teaching staﬀ was successful increating a unique learning environment that these students found enjoyable. A lack of statisticallysigniﬁcant diﬀerences between groups means that individual diﬀerences of the ﬁve teachers did
not supersede the intended impact of program-wide goals and objectives of Summer Session.
This was seen as a positive result because it indicates a solidly designed program where success62

resulted not only from the course content, but also from the five faculty members working
together as a collaborative team. Similarly, a mean average of 8.21 out of 10 on effort spentcompleting the requirements of Summer Session, also without statistically signiﬁcant diﬀerences
between groups, indicates that we were successful in designing a program that challenged
students without overwhelming them. As could be expected, there was a moderate positive
correlation between eﬀort and enjoyment.
While none of the students specifically commented on the use of their devices, 42.5% of
the students did speciﬁcally reference the project-work as the most memorable part of Summer
Session 2019. As both projects were implemented with the idea of utilizing the added potential
of BYOD, it seems we were successful in creating a seamless blend of both F2F and computermediated interactions to achieve our educational goals.
For the most part, student responses on the open-ended questions were all positive andreflected a level of student satisfaction with and/or appreciation for the Summer Session
program. While the student comments listed in this paper might seem overly positive, theyreflected the overall theme of all of the responses. Only a few students offered any kind ofcriticism, but those were limited to comments like one student saying the classroom was too cold
and another saying the homework was diﬃcult. And while one student simply wrote 「めっちゃしんどいよ」 in the question asking what students would say if they were talking about Summer
Session at Open Campus, another wrote,「朝はやいししんどいけど終わった時の達成感はすごいです｡」

Limitations
This survey was completed during the ﬁnal class period of Summer Session 2019, just after
students had ﬁnished watching the 35 Cool Kansai videos chosen as the best from each class. It is
possible that the timing of the survey in relation to watching the videos inﬂated the memorabilityof the Cool Kansai project as compared to other activities students did in class. Also, a lack ofanonymity on the surveys might have led students to input answers diﬀerently than they might
have if they were anonymous.

Conclusion
Looking at the results from the student survey, Summer Session 2019 was a success. Achange in campus and the introduction of a BYOD program allowed for a major redesign ofSummer Session 2019：Innovation

63

how Summer Session was presented to the students and the types of projects students could
be reasonably expected to complete. While the innovations to the program described in thispaper utilized technology, the focus of the design was in allowing students to work on tasks andcollaborate in ways that are not possible without the technology. Success in this program waspossible due in large part to the willingness of the teaching staﬀ to work together, share ideas,
discuss concerns, and trust each other. The mind is the greatest tool. Innovation in teachingcomes only when students are allowed to perform beyond the limitations or expectations of theirteachers.

References
Garrison, D. R., & Vughan, N. D.（2008).
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Picciano, A. G.（2009). Blending with purpose: The multimodal model.
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php/rcetj/article/view/11/14
Riley, J. E., Gardner, C., Cosgrove, S., Olitsky, N., O Neil, C., & Du, C.（2014). Implementationof blended learning for the improvement of student learning.
, 161‒172. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315880310
Tshabalala, M., Ndeya-Ndereya, C., & Merwe, T. Van Der.（2014). Implementing Blended
Learning at a Developing University: Obstacles in the way.
12(1), 101‒110. Retrieved from http://www.ejel.org/issue/download.html?idArticle＝271,