deutsch.info – vocational courses of the German language Erasmus Project

Project Title

deutsch.info – vocational courses of the German language

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Migrants’ issues; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

The multilingual e-learning platform deutsch.info for learning German has been continuously developed since 2011 within the framework of various partnerships and funding programs of the European Commission. In this project, the online platform was expanded to include work-related language courses and content in the areas of care, crafts & technology, IT and tourism & gastronomy. Ten institutions from eight countries worked on the project for three years, contributing their respective expertise and know-how to developing new course content and thus further developing deutsch.info’s highly popular online language learning offering.

deutsch.info was already a particularly successful free German language learning platform aimed at self-learners, offering the opportunity to train and improve vocabulary and grammar and reading and listening skills by providing complete online courses at levels A1-B2. The 625.000 learners registered so far have the opportunity to see translations of texts, words, and exercises in their chosen language. In this way, self-learners remain motivated at a basic level and receive support in the learning process. The online courses incorporate specifics of life in Germany and Austria and cover different German language varieties as spoken in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to be as authentic as possible. The courses cover 31 topics, 129 lessons, and over 1187 learning units. A total of 35 downloadable lesson packages have also been developed for the teacher portal. It provides a link between offline school lessons and online courses. A teaching package consists of a workbook with texts, exercises, didactic explanations, and additional materials and audio files.

This project focused on German as an important European language, especially in demand in Eastern and Southern European countries due to its great economic importance and the high number of migrants from these countries in Austria and Germany. The result is the expansion of the already very successful multilingual e-learning platform deutsch.info with
– four new work-related language courses on the topics of care, crafts & technology, IT and tourism & gastronomy with a total of 682 exercises and texts;
– a new grammar course with 123 exercises to consolidate what has been learned;
– 109 new contents for the media library with job-specific context;
– an expansion of the portal’s internal dictionary.
All content is available in 22 languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, English, Esperanto, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese. That number means an addition of 3 languages. It should also be emphasized that in connection with the immigration of specialists, important Asian languages, namely Chinese and Vietnamese, have been added.

The new language courses on the multilingual portal deutsch.info are primarily aimed at professionals and learners in vocational education who want to move to Austria or Germany or already live here and at people who need German for work in their home country. Self-study with the new courses can provide better chances for employment in the labor market. As such, it can contribute to counteracting the worker shortage occupations in Germany and Austria but also for the general tourism & gastronomy industries and care abroad.

Since deutsch.info has also been used by many learners who wanted to move to Germany and Austria, mainly from other European countries, the new work-related language courses provide them with important additional language preparation and support that was not available before. Especially for learners living outside large cities, such courses are rarely available. While the pandemic has helped to increase the availability of virtual courses, these courses are often not affordable for people from less developed regions of Europe. Therefore, the project makes an important contribution to meeting the needs of a large number of learners of German.

Project Website

http://deutsch.info/courses

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 427116,29 Eur

Project Coordinator

STUDIO GAUS GMBH & Country: DE

Project Partners

• WBS TRAINING AG
• E@I
• Österreich Institut GmbH
• SINIRLI SORUMLU BILIMSEL ARASTIRMA VE UYGULAMA EGITIM KOOPERATIFI
• Milos Educational Womens Collaboration for Activities in Tourism
• Inter-kulturo mednarodni kulturno izobraževalni center d.o.o.
• Kultur- und Bildungsprojekte e.V.