A look at some of this year’s ELTons nominees

The ELTons are just under one month away, and this year’s nominees feature an exciting range of resources. Here we take a look at a selection of some of the digital-linked nominated products. Winners will be announced at the spangly ceremony on 4th June.  Good luck to everyone! ARM cubes Paul Driver’s ARM (Augmented Reality Media) Cubes are a new way for … Read more

BBC Social Enterprise Project

BBC Learning English has produced Learning Circles as part of a nationwide campaign, English My Way. The programme aims to help people in hard-to-reach areas in the UK, particularly those from Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Somali communities, to learn English. Mike Harrison, ELT producer at BBC Learning English, and Frances Carbines, Project Officer at the British Council, explain a bit more about the project.

What did the British Council learn from the Exploring English: Language and Culture MOOC?

In the weeks since the British Council’s first MOOC ended, I’ve been asking myself what exactly we’ve learned from it. Did it ‘work’, as Nicola asked? My feeling is that it did – not only in terms of the numbers of learners it attracted but in what it achieved within the parameters we set for it. If it wasn’t the ‘true ELT MOOC’ Nicola described, that’s because we didn’t plan for it to be that.

Exploring the British Council MOOC

Either ELTjam and its community of commenters can see the future, or the British Council closely followed this post from January 2013 when they created their 6-week course Exploring English Language and Culture in partnership with FutureLearn.

There’s one critical difference, though. ELTjam thought an ELT MOOC probably wouldn’t work. The British Council made sure that it did. Although, as we’ll see, that does depend on your definition of ‘work’.

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Review: Writing For a Purpose

Writing for a Purpose is a collaboration between the British Council and Coventry University aimed at improve the writing skills of English Language learners heading to an English-medium university, specifically those in the UK. The project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, focuses particularly on the different types of academic writing that students … Read more