Competence Oriented Multilingual Adaptive Language Assessment and Training System Erasmus Project

Project Title

Competence Oriented Multilingual Adaptive Language Assessment and Training System

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 addressing more than one field

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Open and distance learning; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Transport and mobility

Project Summary

The European Union (EU) has put a high emphasis, in Horizon 2020, on youth, education and employment. According to Eurostat, the employment rate for persons aged 20 to 64, as measured by the EU labour force survey (EU LFS), stood at 71.1% in 2016. Further analysis indicates that the EU-28 employment rate among the persons aged 25-54 years has stayed the same since 2001, whereas it has increased for older persons (55-64 years) and has decreased for younger persons (15-24 years) [Eurostat, 2017]. This effect is seen on mostly young, low-skilled workers and non-EU citizens, especially in south and east of EU. Over 76 million people in Europe have low or no qualification. In 2020 perspective, the employment rate in EU should reach up to 75% on an average, with particular attention to those affected groups. In 2015 the refugee crisis has brought migrants from Syria and other countries with different educational background to Europe. The education, as well as the mobility in EU, is the main tool to overcome unemployability in EU. “Languages are more and more important to increase levels of employability and mobility of young people, and poor language skills are a major obstacle to free movement of workers” [EC: Rethinking Education COM(2012) 669 final].

To address the problem of inadequate language competence in Europe, we proposed the Competence Oriented Multilingual Adaptive Language Assessment and Training System (COMALAT). COMALAT is a user-friendly and adaptable language assessment and training platform which is intended to support multilingual and multimodal training materials. COMALAT is an extension of the available open source Learning Management System (LMS) Sakai (https://www.sakaiproject.org/). It has been extended in the frame of the project to provide guidance through language training materials and to offer different authoring possibilities on learning materials, learning path, feedback and grading. Moreover, COMALAT is designed to provide different levels of adaptation related to the selection of learning materials, grading methodology and job-specific preference. The COMALAT System is available at http://www.comalat.eu/app. In addition to an interface for language learners, the system offers an interface for entering further courses and learning materials. The source code of the system is open source and is available for further development, future projects or interested communities at https://github.com/comalat.

The project is in line with current trends in Open Education, namely the creation and delivery of Open Educational Resources (OER). According to the UNESCO – Guideline for OER in Higher Education, “OER are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain and have been released under an open license that permits access, use, repurposing, reuse and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions”. In the frame of the project, the consortium developed language training materials as Open Educational Resources (OER) for the three languages, i.e., English, Spanish and German, in two difficulty levels, namely Beginner and Intermediate level. All produced learning materials (including different media like text, audio, video, images, etc.) are available at http://www.comalat.eu/oer using the most open common creative license (CC-BY 4.0). Additionally, the material is provided in a common e-learning format (QTI Package 2.1) which can be imported into other systems.

To sum up, the challenges which consortium members dealt with have been: (a) insufficient language skills of young people, adults and low-skilled workers which hurdles their mobility and employability in the EU, (b) lack of effective adaptable multi-lingual language training systems, which considers the competence, goals and constraints of users, (c) diversity of languages in EU, each requiring a special treatment in training systems, (d) the limitations of current language training systems to be tailored and customized towards individual needs and to provide intelligent and dynamic adjustment of training plans based on the user behavior, and (e) the related projects/tools not being appropriately available as OER and providing proper IT tool.
The original planning of the project had assumed that labor market migration and mobility occurred mainly between EU states. In 2015, the refugee crisis has led to an unforeseen, huge influx of immigrants from Syria and other countries who are also in need for language and vocational training, but often have substantially different educational background. In order to make the COMALAT System usable for these learners, Arabic and Kurdish were added as instruction languages for the beginner level materials. Moreover, refugees have been involved in the additional material creation and translation process.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 440833 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITAET SIEGEN & Country: DE

Project Partners

• ARISTOTELIO PANEPISTIMIO THESSALONIKIS
• UNIVERSIDAD DE ALICANTE