Abstract:

In Finnish Higher Education, digitalization of language learning and creation of online and blended learning options for University students have become more and more common during the recent years. There are numerous ongoing projects in digitalization of learning languages and some have already ended, and so their results are available already for language teachers.

We will present two of these projects; Aalto Online Learning (A!OLE) projects for creating flexible study paths for language learning at Aalto University and 2Digi – Digitalize Your Teaching, which is a project to promote digitalization of language teaching of the Finnish Network of University Language Centres.

A!OLE was launched in 2016 and it is still ongoing. The A!OLE project is designed to advance and enhance the digitalization of learning at Aalto University by developing and exploring new types of e-learning solutions and pedagogical models for online and blended learning. The outcomes of the A!OLE projects will be used for disseminating best practices and models within a wider learning community. Our presentation will also outline some of the best practices utilizing online and blended learning models in foreign language teaching. We will also present some of the comments from the language teachers who have been creating and utilizing these online models for their teaching.

The other project, 2DIGI – Digitalize your teaching, was created after seeing a need in Finnish University Language Centres to assist language teachers in their transition from an analogue world to a digital one. The focus is on how this transition can be managed pedagogically and offer teachers concrete help for themselves and for their students. In the webpage created in the project, we try to answer many questions language teachers might have in the digitalization process. For example, what is digital literacy and what added value does digitalization give to their teaching? The page also offers a bank of digital teaching resources and tools to assess digital skills and tools to create one´s own digital portfolio.

Keywords:

Language learning, Digitalization, Online learning, Blended learning.