Session Chair: J. Busquets
Teaching Media Literacy and English as a Lingua Franca: Learning by Doing International Projects – An Approach to Teaching Professional English in Higher Education
(Regina Brautlacht)
This paper aims to provide an overview of the data and analysis of a telecollaboration project between three universities that focuses on teaching 21st century competencies. The European Dialogue Project (EDP) started in 2013 and has given students from Germany, Italy and Portugal the opportunity to work jointly online and developing new skills and different literacies. After four successful years, we have developed an approach to teaching professional English using technology and ELF, as well as examining how technologies are best used for learning, more specifically Web 2.0 skills. Furthermore, we have developed a set of guidelines in designing and implementing student collaboration projects for higher education institutions. View Paper
Student Experience and Advancements in the Academic On-Line Foreign Language Teaching at the University of Warsaw
(Anna Pacholak)
It has been 10 years now since the University of Warsaw students could try to learn a foreign language (English in particular) via the Internet using the university educational Moodle platform maintained by the Centre for Open and Multimedia Education of the University of Warsaw. The initiative was undertaken within the 2020 Bologna Process strategy for Higher Education, focusing on the enhancement of the innovative life-long learning systems, mobility, multilingualism and employability empowering. All these lead towards obtaining qualifications through flexible learning paths. As a result, progressively, multi-level and multi-purpose e-courses together with on-line placement tests have been created. They were used by 5 000 users in 2016 and by more than 40 000 e-course participants since the beginning of the project. The paper presents the way in which the concept of online foreign language teaching has been evolving at the University of Warsaw. It focuses on the pilot edition of the on-line courses of English, examining student speech recordings to practise the skill of speaking, that has been launched within the current academic semester (summer 2017). View Paper
Aalto Online Learning – A Pathway to Reforming Education at the Aalto University
(Tomi Kauppinen)
Why is it essential to enrich learning experiences at a university by moving online? What should a university do to reshape its offerings to better fit online learning settings? How to create communities of teachers to facilitate learning about online tech and pedagogy from peers? Who should be involved? In this paper we discuss these questions that have been addressed by the Aalto Online Learning (A!OLE) project to initiate a path for a culture shift in the Aalto University to offer significantly more online/blended learning options for our students. We discuss this from various angles, ranging from the strategic decision to invest in online learning development (motivation), to community building and mutual coaching, and finally to dissemination of best practices for producing online learning resources as university wide shared activities. View Paper