News Story

Proteach Italia – Helping Italians teach English to Italians!

Alan Fletcher, Friday 2 Nov 2007

Proteach Italia is the collaborative research project that was launched on 1st November by the Open University’s KMi and the University of Padova. The project aims to explore the use of new video conferencing innovations to enhance the learning experience of professional groups.
Specifically, the project will evaluate the use of FlashMeeting and Compendium in the teaching of Italian language teaching professionals as they learn techniques for teaching English to students. The teaching professionals will be undertaking a course delivered by the University of Padova using a team of co-ordinators. The course will be delivered in a Moodle environment with the use of FlashMeeting for oral teaching techniques.

"This is a most exciting collaboration for us as it will produce tangible results in our VLE" said Paula de Waal, the e-learning manager of the facoltà di scienze della formazione at the University of Padova. Paula, along with KMi’s Elia Tomadaki is leading the project.

The research team are interested to see the impact of video training as opposed to face to face sessions and to evaluate the analysis of meeting types by analysing the broadcast and text chat use within the tutorial groups.

The research aims to consider the application of live online video intereactions to support the professional learning of language teachers across boundaries. The use of argument mapping with Compendium as a stand-alone or incorporated tool will provide research into the building of visual representation of knowledge in multi language learning environments.

The KMi team of Elia Tomadaki, Ale Okada, Alan Fletcher and Anna De Liddo were very happy to launch the project with a visit to KMi by John Hannon who tutors for the University of Padova. The planned set of exchanges are aimed at finalising the project roadmap and providing some Italian translation for use in the FlashMeeting training sessions. The project will run initially until April 2008.