Anne Fox :: Blog :: Linguistic and Intercultural Preparation for Students

On Monday I returned from the final meeting of the EU Leonardo LIPS project. http://www.eu-lips.de LIPS stands for Linguistic and Intercultural Preparation for Students and the project set out to train university students about to go on their first internship abroad. The situation is high risk in that mistakes made then are diffiult to recover. The great strength of the course which was developed is that it included participants from all over Europe as well as a similar spread of cultures among the trainers. This would be a logistical nightmare if it had not happened 100% online.  

The course content was designed after the project group had investigated what the key situations in such a placement are. By common consent these included first contact by either email or telephone, your first day and what happens when you make a mistake or something else goes wrong. In all, 8 key communicative situations were identified and included in the course. A danger with online courses is that they are too text-based but the LIPS course managed to include live chat exercises, two exercises involving pictures and the course materials included video clips for each unit and audio clips for a couple of them.  The podcast, Absolutely Intercultural http://www.absolutely-intercultural.com was used in two specific units and particpants encouraged to subscribe anyway. There were two rounds of the pilot course, the second one being adjusted to take account of lessons learned in the first round. These improvements were reflected in the improved feedback from both the trainers and the participants. The icing on the cake is that the course has been adopted in adapted form as a standard course for outgoing students in the Hessen region. I can also see other potential applications for example for multi-national companies which expect their employees to collaborate. 

I was not a partner in this project. I was the external evaluator and have therefore been following it at somewhat of a distance. However one of the strengths of the project was that they attempted to keep in touch between project meetings by organising monthly online meetings of the project partners. My institution hosted these and I was the moderator of these meetings in the Horizon meeting rooms. http://www.wimba.com The conclusion was that these meetings really helped to maintain the momentum of the project work. 

It was great to return to Belgium after an absence of nine years. My association with Belgium began about 18 years ago when I went on a three week teacher exchange in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium. This was followed the next year by a full blown student exchange LINGUA project with a different institution. This led to a firm friendship with one of the teachers who I was really pleased to be able to meet up again in Belgium this last week. He is now a headmaster himself and showed me round his new school and so I have been re-acquainted with the Belgian education system. Unfortunately my plane was late arriving to Brussels and therefore late leaving for Copenhagen. So I missed my connection home but thank goodness this was SAS so I spent a short night in a hotel before finally getting home on Monday morning.