The overall results of the project were positive, with students appearing more engaged in class and managing to link the grammatical structures studied to real world examples. Wooclap (particularly when using the “participant pace” feature which allowed students to work through blocks of activities at their own pace rather than wait for the lecturer to move the app on to the next activity) was generally very successful in engaging the students more in answering questions in the specific activities, especially with regard to shyer students who would not normally speak up in class but who would put their answers into the platform. The ability to display student answers all at once also facilitated discussion of the more challenging questions while being able to confirm answers to the easier ones with minimal time loss. However, several lecturers in the team noted that the limited question types available in Wooclap itself meant that some activities were difficult to convert or required considerable lateral thinking. In the feedback, students also requested additional explanations about WHY a particular answer was (in)correct in Wooclap, especially in L3, which is not necessarily easy to introduce into the platform.
Genially was found to be a very powerful and flexible tool to build interactive content, both for flipped learning activities before entering the classroom and as a way to organise materials and activities within the classroom. However, the time cost involved with building a Genially was found to be significant compared to other less flexible platforms such as Wooclap, Mentimeter and even Moodle quizzes. Some group activities which appeared perfect for Moodle forums (such as getting students to comment on each other’s work in Q&A or blog format) turned out not to be practical due to time restrictions on posting that lecturers are unable to override.
Additionally, switching platforms and the particular form of interaction (or lack thereof) between Moodle, Perusall, Genially and Wooclap meant that it was not always possible or straightforward to keep track of individual students’ progress. This was a more significant issue in Lengua 3 where students received part of their coursework grade for contributing to the virtual platforms and the time cost to lecturers of collating these data for assessment was significant.
While initially appearing promising, the least successful of the ICT tools integrated into the two courses was Perusall in L3. During planning, it seemed that the social-media like features of the platform would foster student interaction outside class and encourage reflection about their own and others’ responses to the tasks. In practice, it was found that the majority of groups didn’t comment on other students' responses, and thus didn’t generate the mass and momentum of responses necessary to really benefit from the platform – as already noted in the feedback students felt they were doing the exercises alone rather than in a team as planned. This fitted in with other lecturers’ assessments of Perusall, which was also trialled in Lengua y Civilización B1 (not included in the project) for the course readings but was found to generate limited engagement, with the downside of making access to the readings themselves less flexible. It appears a very promising tool for more mature students (3rd and 4th year) but didn’t fit the cohorts involved in the current project.
Implementation of flipped classroom elements was notably easier in Lengua y Civilización B2, given the more consistent level and small group sizes and that further translation modules depend much less on the prior courses than Lengua 3 and Lengua 4 do. In the end, a similar amount of “content” was covered as in previous years despite the more text-focused deductive approach in contrast to the Powerpoint-focused activities used in previous years. While this does not appear to have had a notable impact on students’ marks, the students appeared more engaged and motivated and this will hopefully benefit them in terms of their metacognitive skills in future courses.
Using interesting texts, in particular with relevance to gender issues, was reasonably successful; however, students struggled to move between different semantic levels, i.e. to relate the grammatical features to the structure of the arguments in the texts and discuss those arguments themselves. Discussing gender issues was a way of integrating greater social awareness into the language-learning elements (a kind of reverse CLIL); however, linking the grammatical features to the argument is a key skill required for both interpreting and writing texts, and thus for translators generally, so further strategies are required to aid B2 students in developing this skill.
Sharing resources, materials and teaching experiences amongst lecturers was considered highly positive. Not only has it given us the chance of creating a bank of materials dealing with gender issues using a number of ICT tools, but it has also given us the opportunity to share impressions on how we implement our courses and different ways of achieving course objectives.