Abstract:

COMALAT is an open learning and assessment platform for the acquisition of language competence at beginner and intermediate levels in German, English and Spanish. It has been created in EU-funded ERASMUS+ project COMALAT (2014-1-DE02-KA200-001589) by European partners University of Siegen, Germany, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and the University of Alicante, Spain between 2014 and 2017. This paper is an overview of the final results of the COMALAT project. It covers a brief description of the COMALAT System, mobile application and the created OER.

COMALAT has been developed as an extension of the available open source Learning Management System (LMS) Sakai to provide guidance through language training materials and to offer different authoring possibilities on learning materials, learning path, feedback and grading. COMALAT is available online as a web-based training system and mobile application for Android smartphones.

With the help of COMALAT, mainly the passive language skills such as vocabulary, reading and listening comprehension are trained. However, active language skills are also promoted by many recording and listening (audio and video) examples. COMALAT is oriented to the strengths and weaknesses of the user, since the learning progress, in the competence assessment, is continuously monitored and, if necessary, suitable additional tasks are recommended by the system after each learning subsection. When recommending additional materials, both the own test evaluations and the evaluations of other learners in the platform are considered. In the COMALAT, project fuzzy grading was developed - a statistical evaluation of test results. In addition, a procedure has been implemented which can identify learner types (archetypal analysis) and thus provide the teacher or the producer of learning materials with information on how learners are evaluated in comparison to the reference types. In order to ensure the addressed adaptability, the system requires an appropriate configuration of the learning material, the possible learning paths and the different feedback variants. For this purpose, a separate system component (authoring tool) was developed that supports configuration mapping.

The original planning of the 2014th ERASMUS+ program and therefore the COMALAT project had assumed that labor market migration and mobility occurs mainly between EU states. In 2015, the refugee crisis has led to an unforeseen, huge influx of immigrants from Syria and other countries that are also in need for language and vocational training, but often have substantially different educational background. In order to make the COMALAT System usable for these learners, Arabic and Kurdish were added as instruction languages for the beginner level materials.

All produced Open Educational Resources (OER) learning materials (including different media like text, audio, video, images, etc.) are available at http://www.comalat.eu/oer using the most open common creative license (CC-BY 4.0). Additionally, the material is provided in a common e-learning format (QTI Package 2.1) which can be imported into other systems.

Keywords:

Vocational Education and Training, Language Competence Assessment.