News Story

webCEF Bags an EU ‘Excellent’

Chris Valentine, Friday 26 Mar 2010

The webCEF project has received an overall ‘excellent’ rating from the EU in its final report. The assessor stated that webCEF showed “high quality of project outcomes and products; good functioning of the consortium and efficient project management [with a] large dissemination of results and a user-friendly website”.

webCEF provided a web-based assessment tool that allowed students and teachers to grade spoken language samples against the Common European Framework scales, originally an initiative of the Council of Europe. Running on a KMi server, and authored by Kevin Quick and Chris Valentine, webCEF built on our experience with the Macromedia Flash Communication Server to allow students to record their samples directly into the website (FlashVlog) as well as uploading pre-recorded media.

Both the assessment scales and web interface were translated into a number of European languages. The assessment tool is still operational and currently contains over 600 user accounts, 650 samples and 2700 assessments.

Carrying on from webCEF, the new CEFcult project takes on-line assessment into the field of intercultural professional competence.