̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - online learning

Cambridge provides English learning platform for Ukraine

sb726 — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 15:50:10 +0000

It is part of the new Future Perfect programme – initiated by the President of Ukraine and being launched by the Ukrainian government – which aims to make English the official language of international communication in Ukraine and open up new professional and personal opportunities for Ukrainians.

̽��ֱ��organisations combined their expertise following a request for help from the Ukrainian government to support Ukraine’s education sector and enhance foreign language learning for both teachers and students, many of whom have been displaced by the war.

As well as helping Ukraine grow international relationships and enable Ukrainians to make better use of other support they have received from the international community since Russia invaded in February 2022, the Future Perfect programme aims to contribute to the rebuilding of the economy after the war.

Thousands of college and university students are among the adult and young adult learners who Ukraine hopes will benefit from the English language learning platform, the first project under the umbrella of Future Perfect and based on Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press & Assessment’s Empower course which provides a mix of engaging classroom materials and online learning.

Cambridge is committed to doing all it can to assist teachers and learners in Ukraine, making its educational excellence available to colleges and universities, and enabling students to continue their studies despite the unprecedented challenges Russia’s illegal invasion has created.

Professor Kamal Munir, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for ̽��ֱ�� Community and Engagement at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, said: “ ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� – as part of its Help for Ukraine package of educational support – acted as soon as the Ukrainian government asked for support with English language learning, drawing on expertise from across our departments.

“Key to creating a platform for such a specific audience, learning in such challenging circumstances, was the technical skills of teams within the academic ̽��ֱ��, and the knowledge and experience of colleagues at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press & Assessment. They have produced in months a resource that would normally take years to deliver.”

̽��ֱ��first-of-its kind project saw Cambridge teams – in partnership with e-learning experts Catalyst IT – combine academic expertise from the ̽��ֱ��, and curriculum expertise from Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press & Assessment to create the online platform and provide learning course materials.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will host the platform on its cloud infrastructure. By using AWS Cloud, the platform will have the ability to dynamically scale to meet future demand for the course, enabling the course content to be available to users anytime from anywhere, all delivered from a highly secure environment. Leveraging the cloud means innovation can be a continuous cycle, ensuring the platform can accommodate future technology developments.

Cambridge will support the launch of the platform – which is being supplied free of charge - before it is handed over to the Digital Ministry of Ukraine.

Fran Woodward, Global Managing Director for English at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press & Assessment, said: “Future Perfect reflects a great ambition for Ukrainian education. This will open doors for Ukrainians who want to improve their English language skills, and will support new global economic opportunities. We are delighted to support English language education in Ukraine and we wish Ukrainian teachers and students every success.”

Valeriya Ionan, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation for European Integration, said: “ ̽��ֱ��full-scale invasion re-emphasizes the importance of developing the skills of our people, and the value of inclusive education. We believe in the transformative power of education to facilitate the skills that can reduce the unemployment rate as English language proficiency is directly correlated to GDP. ̽��ֱ��Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine expresses gratitude to Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� and Amazon Web Services along with Catalyst IT as the technology leaders for the strategic support”.

Dmytro Zavgorodnii, Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine, for digital development, digital transformations and digitalization, said: “Speaking English multiplies opportunities for literally every citizen in Ukraine. For some, it is a chance to find a dream job and for others it is a tool to connect with people or events around the world. Regardless of your future or current occupation, English is essential. Thanks to Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, Amazon Web Service and Catalyst IT, we now have a well-timed approach to develop our population’s skills”.

Joey Murison, Managing Director of Catalyst IT, said: “It has been our pleasure to support this great initiative for the students of Ukraine. Our expertise as world leaders in the maintenance and management of online learning platforms for the higher education sector has enabled us to deliver the platform in record time. We look forward to providing our ongoing support now and into the future for the benefit of the students of Ukraine."

Liam Maxwell, Director, Government Transformation, at Amazon Web Services said: “We’re pleased to collaborate on this initiative that will give Ukrainians the opportunity to enhance their English language skills. Building the Empower platform on the cloud will give the Ukrainian Government the flexibility to dynamically scale the environment to meet the demand for the course, and enables the content to be made available remotely and securely to students. We look forward to seeing the course launch, and hope it has a positive impact on the professional growth of the Ukrainian students who take part.”

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Help for Ukraine

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Help for Ukraine is a developing package of support announced by the ̽��ֱ�� last year. It has also created fully funded residential placements in a wide range of subjects for students and academics, clinical placements for medical students, and help for academics still working in Ukraine.

About Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press & Assessment

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press & Assessment supports millions of English language learners worldwide, working with tens of thousands of organisations in more than 130 countries and territories. Last year it was announced that other English language teaching and learning resources were being made available at no cost as part of Cambridge’s support for the Ukrainian education sector.

People in Ukraine will be able to improve their English using an online learning platform specially developed by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, in collaboration with Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press & Assessment, and technology companies Amazon Web Services and Catalyst IT.

Two students using online learning platform on laptop.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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SOCCs appeal: online learning versus the classroom

sjr81 — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 12:15:50 +0000

I’ve recently finished teaching a five week course on the creative and critical afterlife of Wuthering Heights. We looked at various responses to Emily Brontë’s novel, from the commercial (MTV’s film version which recasts Heathcliff as a blond rock star, oh dear) to the brilliantly eccentric (the still-classic Kate Bush song). I’ve taught this subject before, but this was the first time I’ve conducted a course entirely online, never meeting my students face-to-face. My students had the advantage over me as they could see my short video lectures whereas I had only a small photograph and their postings by which to get to know them.

Academic colleagues sometimes express uncertainty about how teaching online works and I’ll admit to some anxiety about how it would feel to teach students I’d never meet in person. A lecturer friend of mine says he can only imagine teaching students when he can “see the whites of their eyes” and it’s certainly true that any teacher of any subject will know how they respond to their students’ body-language; how one picks up the eager lean forward, or little flicker of comprehension or disagreement, a politely-concealed yawn or exasperated eye-roll as you speak too fast or snigger too long at your own joke.

As well as this kind of physical noticing, eye contact feels important in the classroom. You can prompt someone to speak by staring hard at them, or instigate a cheerful argument by glancing at a student whose opinion you suspect differs from that of the person speaking.

My old school friend Hannah Thompson, a Cambridge alumna who now teaches French Literature at Royal Holloway, writes a wonderful blog about her research into cultural and literary representations of blindness which also charts her own experiences as a partially-blind lecturer. In an article about her research and teaching practice, Hannah describes how she has recently changed her approach in the classroom as she has become less able to make eye contact with class members or recognise faces.

Rather than relying on the connection of eye contact, Hannah encourages her students to forget raising their hands or waiting for the conductor/teacher to bring them in, and to call out their responses and answers instead. Her students were nervous at first, but she describes how, gradually, some of the usual formalities and restrictions of the seminar room began to fall away. ̽��ֱ��students’ understanding of their teacher’s disability and her inspirational mastery and exploration of it, provoked all sorts of interesting responses to their subject of study and to their experience of studying it together.

̽��ֱ��situation in an online seminar room is different to Hannah’s classroom, of course. I can’t see my students’ response to my talks or questions, but I can’t hear them either. It is possible to set up online seminars where students communicate with audio rather than typing or ‘live’ lectures where students can type in real-time questions, but many of my students were in different time zones, dropping in from Japan or the US (and, heavens, Northampton) so we normally didn’t have even that vague sense of each other’s physical presence to aid our communication. Instead, we got to know each other through initial introductions in the orientation week, where students worked out how and where they could talk to me and to each other, and then relied on the space of online forums to discuss the week’s reading.

Much of the recent discussion about online courses has concerned the growth of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) where the emphasis is on massiveness and accessibility. At ICE, our model is the more cosy-sounding ‘SOCCs’ (Small Online Closed Courses), which are taught to closed groups with a limited number of students. Our SOCCs are organic, hand-knitted experiences, carefully designed to fit busy feet and based on the artisanal pedagogic approach for which Cambridge is known: small group-teaching, led by a tutor, encouraging wide-reading and independent thinking.

Unlike most MOOCs, your SOCC tutor will talk back to you when you post a comment or want to argue a point. And like undergraduate modules that develop from year to year, our courses are also protean in their content because they are research-inspired. My ICE colleague Ed Turner recently taught part of his online course in Conservation from the jungles of Sumatra where he was conducting research; my own course was punctuated by a visit to the no less exotic ̽��ֱ�� of Leeds for a conference on creative responses to the work of the Brontës, so I came back to my students with my head full of Lisa Sheppy’s ‘Empty Dress’ and discussions of the Japanese version of Wuthering Heights.

One recent commentator on the MOOCs/SOCCs issue says that the mobility and flexibility of online courses are best suited to vocational subjects designed to respond to an ever-changing employment landscape, and not for traditional academic topics which move more slowly. Adam Kotsko says: “A course on ̽��ֱ��Odyssey could remain relatively unchanged for a long time, but that’s not the kind of thing that people are generally looking for with online ed.” Why ever not? That ‘kind of thing’ (the Humanities in general, or just old stuff?) isn’t inert knowledge. Our readings and understanding of ̽��ֱ��Odyssey, or Wuthering Heights or Ancient Rome change with every year, every new adaptation, or archaeological find, or critical move, or, indeed, with every new group of students who come together to travel with Odysseus, Heathcliff or the Romans.

I also don’t accept that Humanities courses which might rely on traditional techniques of slow and close reading can’t be taught via speedy digital technologies. And, in truth, the online class I was teaching had something rather beautifully old-fashioned about it even in its shiny new medium; as we post and respond to each other, we’re engaging in the communication common to letter-writers over the centuries. Writers, readers, editors, and groups of literary critics have always sent their thoughts over many miles: admiring, caustic, critical, devoted, fannish or furious, and, above all, focused, letters of discussion and comment. Digital letter-writing has its own advantages. There’s a spell-check for a start. Online, in-class discussions are more carefully constructed than emails, longer than tweets, and can use the little windows of hyperlinks which drop interlocuters into related areas of discussion alongside the main topic: I can place a link in a sentence to something that my reader can dive off to read before they come back to finish my sentence.

In a letter to his patron Henry Wotton, John Donne wrote in praise of the power of words to overcome distance:
“…more than kisses, letters mingle souls,
For thus, friends absent speak.”

There are many joys in the weekly encounters of our Certificate and Diploma classes at Madingley, or the yearly visits of our Summer School students who arrive in Cambridge with the swifts, but as Donne suggests, there are other ways to ‘mingle souls’, and although we can’t promise kisses, we think our SOCCs will warm you up.

MOOCs – or massive open online courses – have been touted a cure for the education sector’s ills by some, but merely the latest symptom of it by others. ICE’s Jenny Bavidge discusses the challenges of online teaching and her experience of ICE’s SOCCs (small online closed courses).

I’ll admit to some anxiety about how it would feel to teach students I’d never meet in person.

Jenny Bavidge

Jenny pictured at Madingley Hall

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