Russian Online Erasmus Project

Project Title

Russian Online

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: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Teaching and learning of foreign languages

Project Summary

The project Russian Online has focused on the Russian language, which has a vital economic importance with significant trading partners and there is an increasing demand within EU countries for learning and teaching the language. During the project, the russky.info portal – a free, multilingual online e-learning portal for learning the Russian language – was developed. It contains Russian language courses for autodidacts at the levels A1 and A2 of the Common European Framework for Languages (CEFL). Since one of the aims of the project was to empower older citizens mainly in Eastern Europe, students from universities and young adults to take a more active role at the work place through using their Russian language competence there was an additional focus on teaching business Russian, and offering different kinds of helpful information, downloadable model documents (e.g. letters and contracts for different purposes) to be used for work.

russky.info is a free online platform to learn the Russian language especially oriented towards self-learning that offers the possibility to train vocabulary, knowledge of grammar, reading and listening skills with interactive online courses at the levels A1 and A2 of the CEFL. The entire content of the website is available in 12 language versions (Bulgarian, Czech, English, Esperanto, French, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovene), so the learner always has the possibility to see texts and instructions in their own language, which makes the beginning of the new language easier, especially for a self-taught student. This modern educational website has been programmed with the newest technologies, which allows it to be used on all operating systems and devices (including smartphones and tablets).

Because the Cyrillic alphabet is unknown to the European target audience, a separate introductory course has been devised, as the introduction of a new script and phonological system is essential, especially for a self-taught student: in 10 lessons, all letters are first introduced and then trained and repeated through words and sentences with these letters, in the form of hearing, recognition and reading exercises. The A1 and A2 courses comprise 21 and 17 lessons respectively; each lesson consists of an introductory text or dialogue, explanations about grammar and vocabulary, numerous interactive exercises to practice written and oral comprehension (depending on the lessons, there are up to 19 exercise units, i.e. individual pages with exercises). The specificity of the course is that the texts of the lessons follow a story (businessman Frank goes to Russia to found a start-up), thus it does not only train linguistic skills, but also gives in every lesson interesting informations about geography and history, culture, daily life as well as business (e.g. how to apply for a visa, write a résumé, business meetings…). This allows the user to learn professional vocabulary from the beginning. In addition to the courses, there is a media library with authentic audio, video and text materials, a detailed grammar, dictionaries with 10,000 Russian words translated into 11 languages as well as a forum. The dictionaries are linked to the texts in the courses and the media library by a morphological analyser, which enables the users to click on any word in the text and see its translation in the dictionary.

The website russky.info was created by 10 partners from 7 countries who brought into the partnership various, complementary skills relevant to this project and together developed this sophisticated learning resource. All courses have been elaborated by professional teachers and methodologists of the Russian language from several countries and tested with learners of Russian during several development stages. Thus, they offer a pan-European approach and guarantee the quality and the appropriateness of the materials for each level as well as interesting topics that are relevant for the target audience.

User statistics during the first three months after the end of the project life cycle already shows that high long-term impact on the learners can be expected from the main project result, the russian.info website. During the three months September to November 2017, 1,500 users have registered on the website and almost 26,000 visits have been counted, corresponding to an average of approx. 275 visits per day. It is estimated that approx. 9.5 pages are opened per active user and session. The online community of russky.info was created through an extensive online dissemination campaign and the russky.info Facebook page has reached 4,350 followers.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 291019 Eur

Project Coordinator

E@I & Country: SK

Project Partners

• INTER-KULTURO MEDNARODNI KULTURNO IZOBRAZEVALNI CENTER DOO
• Mediaost Events und Kommunikation GmbH
• OSTRAVSKA UNIVERZITA
• Statny pedagogicky ustav
• VILNIAUS UNIVERSITETAS
• STUDIO GAUS GMBH
• CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY