In higher education institutions, the students are trying to cope with, and to talk and to write about complex material in the foreign language. Within this framework, it is significant to integrate foreign language learning into the curricula in order to meet the language needs of EU firms and employees by providing tools through developing multilingual communication skills. Content Language and Integrated Learning (CLIL) aims to guarantee that the learner understands the content and during this process it increases the autonomy of the student and reduces the centeredness of the teacher. In this way, it focuses on improving the skills and makes students learn contextualized language items that are always functionally important for the learners. Therefore, the present project is based on the CLIL approach, to which the innovative VR technology has been added. The aim of this project is to develop an immersive English for Professional Purposes course through realistic VR experiences in response to communicative demands in the engineering workplace. This VR-based course will provide practice for prospective engineers to improve language skills required in professional life faster by combining unique VR applications with e-tutorials with an inter-cultural aspect. This ground-breaking technology supported by e-tutorials helps raise students’ engagement with the necessary language skills to acquire language competence by visualizing the situations with real-life scenarios and improve their career opportunities. EU’s Education and Training Monitor charts EU and the country progress using six targets, two of which suit the main target of this project: 1. to reach the employment rate of recent graduates of 82% 2. to reach 15% adult participation in learning With this in mind, in the modern workplace language competence is as crucial as technical expertise. By developing effective interpersonal skills, prospective engineers as potential candidates of skilled labour mobility can possess the competence to engage in various technical and commercial activities as well as science and technology growth. As for the methodologies of the project, three phases have been specified as preparation, production, and application. Each phase has been determined according to the requirement of the project. The outcome of the project will be an extensive Business and Engineering English learning resource that will enhance the employability of engineers internationally.
Teaching English for a considerable amount of time, the coordinating and the partner institutions were already aware of the need to integrate communication skills more into the curriculum specifically for Engineering students. However, although awareness was the first step, this need must be scientifically put forward and the practice should depend on valuable scientific data and its analysis. Therefore, in the first step of the project, a survey instrument to determine the needs of professional engineers in English was formed and the survey was completed by 270 engineers from Austria, France, Poland, Spain and Turkey. These results were combined with real-time observations conducted in 10 different companies in the countries mentioned above with the aim of determining the needs in English. Following this, the English for Specific Purposes curriculum in different higher education institutions in all partnering countries were analyzed and the common weaknesses were presented by comparing with the needs. The data of these studies were analyzed and under the light of this research and its analysis, the second step of the project which was the production phase began and one self-containing module syllabus was created by each partner and fine-tuned in order to achieve a smooth transition to material design stage. According to the specifications provided for different types of materials, each partner prepared various types of materials. These materials were piloted in the partner institutions and according to the survey results conducted on students and teachers and also the questionnaire results responded by senior teachers who overviewed the course, the materials and the course in general was refined. Therefore, after all the steps taken within this work package, the materials were refined and fine-tuned. The whole course including the all the completed versions of the materials are ready to use for both students and teachers on both the official website of the project: https://ibeevr.itu.edu.tr/i-bee-vr-modules/ and on Moodle platform which is intended for personal use and the activities there are all refined for that use: http://moodle.ibeevr.org/. Professional development was required in order to teach this innovative course. This course was implemented after the refinement and this stage was also analyzed by surveys and interviews conducted on teachers and students. As part of the professional development, 2 short term training events, which mainly focused on how to teach by using the platform and by the integration of Virtual Reality component, were held and attended by 47 instructors in total which definitely had and would have a multiplying effect since all these training documents and presentations would be shared with prospective teachers of the course. Since these trainings and their outcomes should stay for further practice a restricted Facebook page was created in order to share experiences. Within the scope of the project, English needs analysis was applied to 275 professional engineers and observations were made in 10 international companies. English for Specific Purposes curricula of 32 educational institutions in 5 project partner countries were examined and a report was prepared. By analyzing all these data, deficiencies and needs were determined, and then the course curriculum was created. The project was introduced with in-house meetings at five partner institutions, and an in-house introductory meeting was held at Istanbul Technical University School of Foreign Languages. During the project process, 2 international conferences and 7 transnational meetings were held. The project course includes 5 modules consisting of about 90 different activities and assessment for each module, 2 or 3 tutorial videos have been prepared. In addition, there are videos shot in real business environments in each module. For each module, 2 virtual reality scenarios and activities were prepared. The project course was piloted in 4 different institutions and then implemented. The educational platform, which currently has 110 users, will be opened free of charge to the requesting institutions after the project is closed.It would be a language course for Istanbul Technical University, Ecole Centrale de Lille and Polytechnic University of Catalonia and with some modifications due to the levels of the students or time allocations and a "how to teach a VR course" course for to-be teachers in University of Vienna and Pedagogical University of Krakow. This innovative course that meets international standards and integrates foreign language-related business skills into a digital platform with an immersive virtual reality technology that increases the expected impact on engineering students has been one of the most important outcomes of the project.The institutions will continue to implement the course not just for engineers but also for teachers educating these engineers and will support the use of the open source course.