An exploratory study of tertiary English course performance in Taiwan from the perspectives of ACE accreditation for e-learning courses

Both the Curriculum Guidelines of 12-Year Basic Education announced in 2018 [1] and the 2030 Bilingual Nation policies emphasize the English communication competency in Taiwanese education. With the rise of the communicative language teaching approach, the greatest challenges faced by teachers are motivating students, initiating interaction and increasing learning efficiency. However, whether teachers could successfully transfer their accumulated experiences towards these challenges to the online environment due to the covid-19 pandemic is still unknown; everyone in education has been forced to participate in the world-scale action experiment. To put learning efficiency aside, the quality of e-learning or distance learning must be strictly monitored and gatekept. Thus, the present study aims to gauge the performance of college English courses and the problematic issues in common. The study adopted convenience sampling of the 39 English course applications from the Accreditation Center of E-Learning data of the Ministry of Education. Descriptive statistics were performed for categorization to establish basic information about the courses, followed by a detailed qualitative analysis of the result reports of 32 courses to reveal the passing rate and the issues faced by the applications. The findings displayed similar results in accordance with other applications. The most difficult issue to overcome is the interaction between the teacher and the students as well as among the students synchronously or not. In addition, the results also showed that timeliness and ways of providing assessment feedback can influence motivation. The present study attempts to preserve the actual characteristics of English courses in tertiary education, to indicate universal problems from the perspectives of the e-learning accreditation mechanism. It is hoped that these results may serve as a basis to facilitate future applications and course designs of English teaching in e-learning.