Building Open Online Series for Teaching Erasmus Project

Project Title

Building Open Online Series for Teaching

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 : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Open and distance learning; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

The BOOST Project (Building Open Online Series for Teaching) aims to improve the digital readiness of teachers of English as a foreign language to students aged 8 -14 by providing an open-access series of engaging native-speaker content videos linked with a Resource Pack of ready-made activities to stimulate production of the language in online learning. The objective is to enable teachers to use this content and accompanying teacher training guidebook and procedures in their online lesson delivery, and learn to adapt the process and create their own materials, and develop and share the ideas from the project with peers; to help teachers to develop students’ communicative competency in English in the target regions.

The project recognises the importance of online, blended, and hybrid education in the current context and the gap in resources with accompanying guides and training currently available to teachers.
The project aims to create a teacher-pack, suitable to teachers of all levels of technical competency, to boost their preparedness to use digital resources to accelerate their students’ progress and improve their accuracy and ability in the communicative skills. The content will feature native-speaker audio in a variety of dialects and accents and activities will be designed by pedagogic experts to form part of a communicative online or blended lesson and stimulate students’ verbal production of language.

BOOST will be carried out by three participating language schools, in Czech Republic, United Kingdom and Ireland, who are building on an existing series of collaborations around the area of training of English teachers of young learners. The partners will prepare two intellectual outputs, one focusing on a Teacher’s Resource Packs for digital education for levels A0, A1, A2, B1 according to CEFR and the second on production of the Open Online Series of Videos. Within the overall structure of those two outputs, the partners have developed an activity plan that focuses on phased project exeuction along established lines of expert content development within a project of this scope.

The project partners will initially research and prepare the optimum content delivery style and format, and then reach participating schools in the target group with a pilot programme of initial representative content. This will involve teachers from at least 9 schools teaching pupils at different CEFR levels from A0 to B1 at age 8 – 14; and the teachers will be engaged to act as conduits for the success of the pilot content. From this pilot, the partners will be able to analyse results and optimise the content to ensure maximum engagement for the target group students.

The project outputs will be shared in the partner countries in addition to Italy, Spain and Austria via multiplier training events, enabling teachers to implement and adapt the content. It is in this way, the project aims to kickstart the usage of engaging native-speaker content in classrooms where there is limited access to interactions with native speakers by enabling English teachers reached by the project to take leadership and mentoring roles within their institutions and support and develop their peers in the use and adaptation of the content; and provide opportunities for more teachers to strengthen communicative teaching skills in this context.

Furthermore, the easy-to-use nature of the content will be a natural entry point for teachers low in training in the use of digital resources, which, as our research is shown is the norm, and open doors for further use of digital media to engage and stimulate students in English language classrooms.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 262200 Eur

Project Coordinator

Hello language centre s.r.o. & Country: CZ

Project Partners

• Roxinford Education Group Ltd
• John Daly Atlantic Language Galway Ltd