On the 26th and 27th of September we were very pleased to organise a two day top-up training session at the University of Trento in Italy. Language training at the university is run by the Centro Interfacolta per l'Apprendimento delle Lingue (CIAL) and this is where the MEC training was held.

A view over Trento

The university has been using MEC for over a year and it was fantastic to see the blended learning courses they have built in order to help their students reach CEF level B2. The CIAL has excellent several computer labs plus a computer and projector in every classroom, so there is plenty of opportunity for students to use MEC at the centre as well as for homework. To find an overview of the blended courses run at the University of Trento just click on the link below.

Uni Trento Blended learning presentation.pdf (350.5 KB)

One of the computer labs at the CIAL

It was a real pleasure to meet all of the university teachers. Some were new to MEC and came to the training to get an understanding of MEC resources, how best to use them and how to use them as part of a course. Other teachers had a great deal of experience with using MEC and building courses which meant they were able to share their knowledge with the less experienced teachers and also provide some very useful feedback on MEC.

We look forward to hearing about how the university students get on with the blended learning courses in the coming months.

MEC is currently being used by a number of customers in South America, including the Cultura Inglesa São Paulo (CISP). CISP is a chain of 27 language schools in São Paulo. They were the very first users of MEC, which they call the 'e-Campus'. They have been using MEC since 2003 and it is now used by 45,000 students and 750 teachers.

The Cultura Inglesa building in São Paulo

The Cultura schools have been very successful in incorporating e-Campus into their courses.

We caught up with Vilson Coimbra, e-learning manager for CISP, to find out more.

Supporting teachers

CISP has promoted the e-Campus to teachers energetically as Vilson is clear that this is the best way to integrate the e-Campus into the working life of the school. He explains how 'all new teachers are introduced to the e-Campus during our pre-service programme ... and work on its inclusion in their lesson plans.'

Indeed, at the LABCI conference last month, Vilson demonstrated in a presentation how effectively the e-Campus could be used with an interactive whiteboard, showing examples of creative activities that teachers could use.

All this really helps teachers to harness the potential of the e-Campus: 75% of teachers using it reported in a survey that they were 'Satisfied' or 'Very Satisfied' with its effectiveness.

Encouraging students

CISP continually encourages students to use the e-Campus at home as well as in the classroom. Research undertaken by CISP shows that 57% of students like using computers to learn English, and 71% say that MEC helps them to improve their English.

So how do they do it?

Crucially important is making sure that students are aware of what the e-Campus can offer. For example, the school's web portal offers sample resources and advertises new content that is published to the e-Campus by Macmillan. There have also been seasonal word games competitions for students to enter - which have proven to be very popular.

Vilson adds: 'Nowadays the e-Campus is part of the daily routine of students and staff. It is used in class as part of the practice needed for a specific language item or skill, as an assessment tool at the beginning of a term - and the exercises can be assigned for remedial work and revision.'

We are delighted to introduce a new guest blogger today. Simone Sucupira is a teacher at Cultura Inglesa São Paulo (CISP) - Campinas. She writes:

Simone Sucupira

This year's LABCI conference invited us to discuss education in a situation of changing learning needs. We were challenged to think about what kind of education our society is likely to need in the near future. We asked ourselves the following question: 'How can we make a difference?'

Bearing this in mind, I chose the title 'The e-Campus and Self-Paced courses: the next revolution' for my presentation at LABCI.

Here at CISP, we've been using the e-Campus for quite some time and its adoption has revolutionized our regular courses. The e-Campus has made such a huge difference because although it's a single tool, it's brought many new innovations to our teaching! Here are some of the benefits of the e-Campus: 

•       It's a virtual learning environment which offers consistent content and flexible delivery: students can have optimized input of language anywhere, anytime they like.
  
•       It has added a new, less controlled, asynchronous element to our courses: students are much more free to decide what to do when they are not in the classroom. It promotes learner autonomy! 

One of my students, Guilherme Nunes, once told me: 'The e-Campus as it is now, offers students a lot.' This made me wonder what else we could offer given that the e-Campus has already been so successfully integrated to our courses. Then I realized that listening to what our students have to say about their learning needs is the key to understanding how we can make a difference.

Guilherme kindly granted me an interview which became the basis for discussing two of the most important questions I posed during my presentation:

•     What kind of learning opportunities could our students need that we might not be offering at the moment?
•     As an e-learning tool, has the e-campus achieved its full potential?

Here's Guilherme's interview.

In my presentation, I tried to demonstrate that the e-Campus currently offers students at CISP a great deal but has potential for much more! It might evolve from a supplementary tool into a self-contained, independent, on-line learning course.

At CISP we will be as ready to adapt as we are keen to offer the best learning opportunities to our students who, as in the case of Guilherme, sometimes cannot fit their schedules to our regular classes.

Marcela Moya

In a 4,000 kilometre long country where distance is clearly not a choice, the British Institute in Santiago started developing distance learning programmes of English as a foreign language in 2000. In 2004, we decided to incorporate the English Campus as a powerful online source of EFL learning resources into our face-to-face and distance learning programmes. We soon realised that the potential behind the possibility of generating tailor-made courses for every type of internal and external user with a wide range of needs was simply enormous.

At the moment, we have created over 100 different courses for our language school face-to-face teen and adolescent students, face-to-face students from our recently launched Universidad Chileno Británica de Cultura – The British University, students from traditional state and private universities which have signed agreements with us to generate blended English programmes and an important number of 100% distance students spread out along the length of the country. The courses designed for this last segment include Cambridge ESOL KET, PET, FCE, CAE, CPE and IELTS exam preparation courses online and Cambridge ESOL TKT (Teaching Knowledge Test) three-module courses for EFL teachers in need of an international teaching certification.

Map of Chile

 Cultura Inglesa São Paulo

'Here at Cultura Inglesa São Paulo the "e-Campus" (that is what we call MEC) is widely used both as part of the regular curriculum and also for remedial work.

For our business English students, the e-Campus has been used along with two distance courses run by The Club, our business executive unit.

One of these courses is called "emailing" and helps students develop their writing skills. On this course students are emailed activities which require them to write business emails and reports and subsequently submit them to a teacher at the unit. After analyzing the student's text, the teacher replies with comments and suggestions for improvement.

The other course is called "phone classes". On this course students schedule a time to practise their English with a teacher over the phone, and the main focus is on fluency. Prior to the scheduled phone class, the student receives a text to read or a task to work on, such a product presentation. During the conversation on the phone, the teacher makes notes of the student's performance and proposes a course of action for improvement.

For both courses the e-Campus provides activities which help students to practise the language they need for written or conversational English. Specifically the e-Campus provides topics of conversation taken from the news items. It also provides the opportunity for remedial work that the teacher has identified as necessary when analyzing a student's written or oral work.

The improvement achieved by the students as a result of their e-Campus practice can be assessed in future written work or phone conversations.'

5. Peer teaching.

'Divide the class into two or more groups. Members of each group study a particular Grammar Reference Unit (GRU) at home and complete the corresponding language exercises. In the next class, they teach/tell their peers in the other group what they studied and what they have learned.  This could be done equally well to promote discussion by using different news items.

Grammar reference unit

6. Vocabulary quizzes.

Learners read a particular news item at home, check MEDO and add any new words to their Wordlists, but without the definitions. In pairs, they then "test" their partner next lesson to see how much they know and can remember. They then do the food for thought questions together as a class.

MEDO

7. Web projects.

Learners do a web project at home (remember they can also print them out in hard copy) and add any new vocabulary to their Word Lists. They then present their findings to the class. As a follow-up, they could create their own short web projects for their peers to complete.

8. Consider modifying the level of challenge or the task.

Why not rethink the way learners approach resources? For example, get them to read different levels of the same news item and compare the language used, suggest they use the Hint or Audio box to hide the questions when doing a listening activity or encourage them to use the audioscript as a reading text - but without the audio. Be creative!

This list is of course just a taster of what's possible. We'd love to hear the ideas you've got for things which have worked well! Leave a comment.'

'What homework have you been setting for your learners on MEC?  Have you been pointing them to a particular part of their course and giving them specific resources to complete or just letting them dive in and explore? 

While neither approach is necessarily wrong, a "guided discovery" approach will allow your learners to use MEC in a more structured way and give you scope to exploit the full range of resource types on the database.

To whet your appetite, below are a few ideas for MEC homework which you might like to consider. Have a look also at Part 3 of the Guide to MEC.

1. Get them to practise their basic MEC skills. 

We've put together some ready-made worksheets for you on our support site. You can print these off and give them out as homework. Easy! There are even separate teacher's notes with answers.

2. Give them a list of resources.

Another quick and easy way to set homework. Simply give your learners a list of relevant resources by title. They then find the resources for themselves at home, bookmark them and complete them. This has the added advantage of getting learners to practise their searching and bookmarking skills!

   3.    Finish an activity at home.

Start a MEC resource in class. For example, you could just do the first few questions of a language exercise together, get them to predict the contents of a news item from the photo or headline or just listen to the audio of a listening activity. Then you could get your learners to complete the activity at home.

4. Treasure Hunt.
   Prepare a hidden sentence comprised of, say, 10 words found in different parts of MEC. They could be words from an audioscript, from the questions to an exercise or even from the MEC interface itself. Your learners have to search the database to find the words and complete the sentence. They then prepare a similar sentence for their peers next lesson. This could be done as a race - first group to find all the words wins!'

Have you ever tried any similar ideas? Do you find them useful? There will be more tips from Mike in tomorrow's posting so keep watching the blog to find out what they are.

Judith Dick

'Hi! I'm Judith from the French speaking part of Switzerland. I manage MEC at OPTI alongside Pierre-Alain who looks after the technical details. We have more than 1000 students and well over half of them are absolute beginners or low elementary.

Our problem: many of our teachers were reticent to use MEC at first, complaining that beginners couldn't understand the instructions! We devised the following solution:

When students start using MEC for the first time they download a pre-prepared exercise from their individual servers, or they watch and copy from the projector. They must translate and order the MEC vocabulary correctly. We used TextEdit to create these exercises as we are all using Macs here. You could also use Word on a PC. Here are some examples (tables are shaded in yellow where students have completed the exercises):

The exercises are then saved into a MEC folder on the desktop, always ready for use. Within this folder students keep the files for different MEC activities, vocabulary and instructions that they have translated. This helps them gain greater independence right from the start.

For translations we encourage students to open Wordreference.com in a separate browser. Monolingual dictionaries are great but not much use for real beginners. I suspect quite a number of elementary students find them a challenge too.

We also have another great idea for easy translation if you use Firefox as your web browser. Within Firefox2 (US) you can add a useful instant translation tool. Go to Mozilla Addons click on dictionaries and install the language you require. Then when you hover over a word in your browser, up comes the translation. It's brilliant and defies all those "can't dos"!'

What do you think of the OPTI approach? How does it compare to your organization? Leave a comment.

Judith will soon be back with a clinic on her experiences with MEC at OPTI. For more information, watch this space!