Teaching foreign languages is currently a must in educational systems all over the world and having relevantly qualified teachers is taken for granted. Foreign language teachers, no matter how well qualified they are, over time they experience feeling of the need to upgrade their skills and competences because of not having a direct contact with the language they teach. Long time monitoring of the needs of foreign language teachers by teacher trainers in institutions involved has proved the vital need for refreshment courses the foreign language teachers look for. National CPD institutions rarely provide such courses and courses offered abroad are not accessible to everyone. Furthermore, current COVID-19 pandemic has made the situation even more complicated. That is why the consortium of project partners has decided to develop CPD e-courses for English teachers online. The objective of the project is to design four modules of e-courses for English teachers which can easily be combined to satisfy different professional needs of English teachers and their different time availability. Furthermore, such e-courses are accessible also to participants with special needs. The e-courses for English teachers will be designed and developed by the consortium of four partners from three countries – Aspekt Foundation and Teacher.sk from Slovakia, Ostrava University (OSU) from the Czech Republic and University of Bielsko-Biala (ATH) from Poland. Three of the partners (Aspekt Foundation, OSU, ATH) are experts in foreign language (English) course provision, two of them (OSU, ATH) in teacher training and one of them (Teacher.sk) is an IT expert. Two partners (OSU, ATH) are higher education institutions, one partner Aspekt Foundation is NGO, and Teacher.sk is SME. All project partners have highly qualified staff with long-term experience in the field. In order to achieve the above stated objectives, the project partners will make sure the relevant measures are taken within the life of the project and conditions for their fullfillment are created in their respective institutions. This task requires: - to design an innovative modular system of e-courses devoted to four areas identified by in-service teachers as a need for improvement: grammar competences, language skills, methodology of teaching English skills and competences, literature and intercultural knowledge upgrade; - to develop training materials in compliance with the designed modules and suggested e-courses, i.e. to design and agree the content and topics addressed in e-mode delivery; - to pilot developed e-courses for English teachers in preliminary summer training activities to get feedback from their participants in order to make necessary amendments in them; - to make the target groups aware of the project about the developed e-courses and make them accessible to those who are interested; - to design CPD e-course(s) for English teachers in compliance with national legislation and submit them for accreditation to the relevant legislative body, - to advertise the accredited e-courses for English teachers and run them by institutions involved in the project, and use them as examples of good practice for other institutions. The intellectual outputs developed within the life of the project will all be accessible on the project website not only for project partners but also for a wider community of in-service English teachers as well as will-be English teachers and other interested public also beyond the project life. They will serve as the basis for multiplier events (E1 – E3) with project stakeholders who are expected to use it directly or disseminate the information about the e-courses to staff and experts involved in teaching foreign languages. The developed materials will have a considerable impact on the target group of English teachers as to their language and methodology competences and skills and self-confidence and quality of learning outputs of their students. It is expected that the materials will be used long after the project life when the institutions involved in the project will advertise and run the accredited CPD e-courses for English teachers and when even other stakeholders responsible for CPD of teachers will consider the materials displayed on the project website and methodology used for their development as examples worth to follow and develop similar e-courses for teachers of other subjects.
In relation to the horizontal priority Innovative practices in a digital era the ambition of the project partners was to create a number of e-courses within the four modules, each of which would be devoted to different area of language and teaching skills (English grammar, methodology of teaching English, communicative competences in English, literature and culture for school learners), and which could be creatively combined into tailor-made continuous professional development courses meeting the teachers´ needs in refreshing their English language and teaching competences online. Implementation of the created modules with the e-courses should promote a comprehensive approach to language teaching and learning and at the same time in this way implementation of the project outputs should contribute to improving quality of English language competences of teachers as well as to increase of the quality of their teaching and teaching outputs.
Language teachers need a constant contact with the language they teach; otherwise they are loosing their language competences. Great majority of them of them are looking for courses which in many home countries of the teachers are rarely accessible (on offer) and not all the teachers can afford to attend them abroad. That is why there has arisen an idea to design e-courses for English teachers to solve this situation. This intention was enhanced also by the coronavirus pandemic and the need to transfer education to its online forms. The situation showed that not all the teachers and all the learners were ready to transfer from face-to-face education to online education, partialy because of the lack of teachers and learners´ e-skills, but mainly because of the lack of teaching e-materials. Online teaching was proved as the best solutions of the given situation. The developed modules of e-courses suit this situation. They can be used as supplementary materials for in-service English teacher students as well as for CPD courses which many practising teachers lack. Moreover, the modular system makes the courses suitable to be tailor-made for learners needs.