Coaching connected learning across borders

If you are considering the gap year offer from I Go To China (which can also be just six months long), you may be wondering what it’s going to be like. You won’t be going to the well-known places such as Shanghai or Beijing. The whole point is that you will be going to rural…

In spite of tough economic conditions the idea of a gap year just before or after university or at any stage of life can be very attractive. There is now a huge industry built around offering gap year experiences and these are usually very expensive requiring a great deal of fund raising beforehand. So an…

What the world needs now is people with entrepreneurial skills. If you are studying at a European University you can do this through the Leonardo scheme which will help you with travel and subsistence costs. But how about getting a foreign internship in a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) rather than a larger well known…

The Consultants-E is offering a scholarship to enable one person living and working in a developing country (as defined by the World Bank) to take their e-moderation skills course starting in October free of charge. What is e-moderation? It’s the skill of guiding students through online learning activity whether that forms part of a blended…

What’s the best way of producing an interactive language learning book? The book is aimed at retired people in Denmark. All you hear these days is iPad but I don’t think the iPad has penetrated this sector so widely that we should be looking at an exclusively iPad solution. As I investigated the challenge it…

In UniKey we are developing and piloting an online training for trans-border SME interns which will help them reflect on important aspects of the entrepreneurial skill-set such as confidentiality, ethics, patents, self-organisation and intercultural issues. Participants will complete tasks about their own placement as well as working with interns in other countries on joint collaborative…

I sometimes wonder if we are over-dependent on projects here in Europe but a recent visit to South Africa has shown me that projects are maybe the best way forward for many reasons. But wherever you are there will always be doubts about some projects. This is my first ever visit to that country and…

In the Uni-Key project we have promised to make our proposed digital course accessible on mobile devices so when I took the family iPad on a work trip instead of my usual netbook, I was taking note of what worked and what didn’t so that we can be better informed about good practice when we…

Having just completed another very successful Intensive Programme in Lithuania, I witnessed once again the challenges of working in a second language. As a native speaker and a teacher on the programme, I was acutely aware of the huge extra efforts it takes to understand the different variations of English which are common in the…