Abstract:

I would like to present here the evolution and transformation of a foreign language e-learning project for Italian University students.
The innovative features of this project, where several European languages and proficiency levels are targeted, derive from three main drives: first of all, the acknowledgment of e-learners’ difficulties concerning typical social and cognitive aspects of the e-learning contexts previously reported in the literature; secondly, the desire to adapt the multimedia language courses to some of the Italian “Guidelines for Educational Projects” for assuring high learning quality and technological standardization (e.g. accessibility). Finally, we drew on recent progress in the fields of CALL and the psychology of multimedia learning.

The research and the implementation areas we are focusing on at present include:
- teaching and learning implications of the adoption of a socio-constructivist platform like Moodle which includes web 2.0 applications for synchronous and asynchronous communication (forum, chat…) as well as applications for promoting collaborative tasks (wiki, blog…).
- teaching and learning implications deriving from the recent restructuring of our courses and materials into Los, especially through the inclusion of assessment tools preceding, during and following the courses, and through the communication of teaching objectives, and the possibility of tracing all online study and assessment activities.
-The added teaching value potentially offered by subjective metadata (i.e. the “Educational” field in the “Standard for Learning Object Metadata” produced by IEEE/LSTC) in terms of an intercultural approach to L2 teaching (in various EU and non-EU countries) and in terms of collaborative expansions for the same materials.