MustLearnIT Project

 

Alan Pritchard, Ann Barnes and Marilyn Hunt worked with a team led by academics in Greece, and involving work in Finland, Poland, Cyprus, Greece and the UK. The MustLearnIT project was a European funded research project investigating the ways in which video conferencing technologies could enable the learning of specialist subjects in remote primary schools. In practice this meant that the UK team looked at the teaching of Modern Foreign Languages, specifically French and Spanish, and the other partners looked at the teaching of English, all through the medium of internet based video conferencing.

 

The project had the aim of discovering a methodology for language teaching (even though the specification did not exclusively refer to languages, it referred to any subject where teacher expertise might be in short supply), to children in remote primary schools.

 

For all of the partners, except for the UK, remote had a very clear meaning. It meant schools which were very isolated and had very few pupils. For example, there were schools in the mountains in Greece, or on small islands, with one teacher and perhaps only one or two children of the statutory age for teaching English. If the teacher did not have the ability to teach English the children could, in the terms of this project, be taught by a teacher in a distant location, often with a class of children of the same age. Most of the partners, again with the exception of the UK, and also part of the Finnish work, made use of a simple video conferencing system known as Centra (the Uk did use this to a lesser extent). This system does not involve high costs; all that is needed is a web cam and an internet connection. The quality is not always excellent, but the schools involved were very happy with the results.

 

In the UK we used a different model. We worked with a local language college and three small primary schools who wanted to develop the teaching of French or Spanish but had little teacher expertise. We made use of more sophisticated equipment, with a higher cost. The expert teacher in the language college was able to see the whole class in the primary school, and the whole class could see and respond to the teacher on a big screen. We also experimented with the use of Centra.

 

The results were very encouraging. In the UK motivation was high and there was good evidence of learning. An appropriate pedagogy was developed by the teachers involved to suit the use of the technology.

 

Project website: http://mustlearnit.cti.gr/

 

The evaluation of the MustLearnIT project is now available. The report can be read as PDF file from this link:

http://www.chydenius.fi/julkaisut/julkaisusarjat/tekstitjul/978-951-39-2972-5.pdf