Enriching education offerings with collaborative learning and engaging multimedia content and by tracking student progress and motivation

Danish language teacher Anne Boulay says itslearning helps her gauge the effectiveness of her teaching.

Danish language school CLAVIS sprog & kompetence went searching for a learning platform because CLAVIS is always in search for the ultimate communication tool.
CLAVIS needed a tool that would offer its students the audio and visual aids to support their learning. Pernille Helena Rasmussen, head of department at CLAVIS sprog & kompetence at Roskilde, also wanted to remedy the teacher’s use of different tools to coordinate their traditional classroom teaching and blended teaching. They wanted to consolidate their technology offerings. They needed the right tool to support their pedagogical philosophy. They chose itslearning.

“We needed a useful learning platform in order to work with The Flipped Classroom by showing pictures, audio and videos files which the students can work with both in school and at home. Using multi-media content helps us engage as many of our students’ senses as possible. They are a varied group. It gives us the audio/visual tools to motivate our students so they can be a part of the learning and so that we can implement a cooperative learning approach and the students can reflect over their own learning in different ways for examples by logbook writing either by the teacher or by themselves depending of which level they are in,” Pernille says.

Determined to make itslearning succeed at CLAVIS, the project group responsible for the integration of itslearning initiated two itslearning projects. First, they moved all school information onto a school intranet on itslearning, “forcing” teachers to access the platform for news and updates. At the same time they established an itslearning ambassador group comprising teachers and asked them to explore and test itslearning. These pioneers and interested teachers, among them teacher Anne Boulay, would be the first to roll out the platform in their classes.

Boulay has many expectations for itslearning. She says it will be a positive contribution to her teaching, allowing her students to work at their own pace and simplifying how she evaluates students and pinpoints what motivates them. “With itslearning, my students can control the pace of their learning. They can do extra exercises if they feel they are not challenged enough. Students progress at different paces, and they like to proceed at their own pace. They can review old materials or move ahead and complete unfinished assignments because all of the coursework is on the platform,” Anne says.

If students are not progressing, the answer for why not may lie in itslearning. She can assign a test on the platform and analyzes the results. She can see how many times a student completes a test and how long it took them to answer individual questions. This shows her which subjects and topics the students struggle with. “On the reverse side, positive results can be interpreted as evidence of student motivation. If enough students answer correctly, I can tie that success back to a particular in-class lesson where I introduced the topic. This allows me to trace their motivation back to the source and will allow me to gauge how effective my teaching is. I see itslearning functioning as a kind of red line that connects points in the semester. With itslearning, students always know how they are progressing because they have been able to follow their learning progress on the platform.”

In addition to offering teachers a single place to conduct online teaching activities, itslearning will help the tuition at CLAVIS stay organized. It fits into CLAVIS’s plans to organise course materials according to the Common European Framework (CEFR), which divides learners into three categories of proficiency. It will allow them to create the same folders for every unit, for example spelling, listening and reading. In addition, each course is comprised of modules that are organized under the CEFR structure. Itslearning allows teachers to easily insert previously-used start materials and an introduction to the language into each course’s navigation tree where course materials are organized. Start materials include for examples alphabet, numbers review and telling time worksheets. Anne also looks forward to embedding YouTube videos into the platform.

Anne also plans to use itslearning as a news forum where she will publish classroom reminders and information about school events. “I see that it will be a great tool for relaying information. It will make me confident and ensure that everyone has the right, important information. We have many classes and many students, so it can be difficult to remember if certain students were in class and got the information when I announced it in class. You know he has the information even if he missed class because it is on itslearning.”

About CLAVIS sprog & kompetence
CLAVIS sprog & kompetence is an independent non-profit language school with four departments. It offers among others courses in Danish as a second and foreign language, intercultural communication training and adult learning courses.

Facts
Customer: CLAVIS sprog & kompetence
Country: Denmark
Number of students: 3500 annually
Sector: Language studies
Teaching staff: 50
Using itslearning since: 2013

At a glance
• Audio/visual tools engage students’ senses in school and at home
• Students working at their own pace
• Tracking student progress and motivation
• Course materials organized according to European language framework