Dr. Maria Perifanou
Dr. Maria Perifanou is an adjunct lecturer at the Faculty of Italian Language & Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, an adjunct academic staff at Hellenic Open University, TESOL Master's Programme, and a senior researcher at the Smart and Mobile Learning Environments (SMILE) Lab of the University of Macedonia (GR) in the field of CALL and TEL. She holds a Master's degree in ICT and Foreign Language Education from Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, (IT), and a Ph.D. from the University of Athens, (GR), in the field of Applied Linguistics. Over the last ten years, she has collaborated with various European research institutions on more than 35 EU projects in the field of Technology-Enhanced Learning, notably LangMOOC, OPENLangNetwork, DC4LT, PASTILLE, FeSTEM, and CARAT. Furthermore, she worked for 3 years as a TEL consultant and project coordinator at the Open Education Europa portal for the Commission's Directorate-General for Education and Culture (DG EAC). She is the author of over 60 articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and books. She is also a member of different European TEL research networks and communities and has also been awarded several international and national scholarships and fellowships for her research.
Sessions
In this session, we will present the OpenLang Network platform, an open and collaborative Moodle-based environment for networking between language learners and teachers across Europe. The OpenLang Network platform brings together educators wanting to discover and share open language learning resources, as well as Erasmus+ mobility participants that wish to improve their language skills and cultural knowledge. This initiative is funded by the Erasmus+ programme and aims at raising language awareness of mobility European languages, as well as fostering the Open Education European multicultural and multilingual vision via Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). You can access and join the OpenLang Network platform at: https://openlang-network.kmi.open.ac.uk/.
In this session, we will present the LangMOOC platform (http://study.langmooc.com/), an open language learning Moodle-based environment which offers openly accessible language courses in 5 languages (Greek, English, Italian, German, and Norwegian). The LangMOOC is a project co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ KA2: Strategic partnership programme and its focus is to provide support for language learning and promote multilingualism via the implementation of Massive Open Online Courses for Language Learning. The main aim of the project is to research the potential of MOOCs in Language Learning, to explore the pedagogical framework of Language MOOCs, to develop a toolkit for the creation and management of Language MOOCs and Open Educational Resources (OERs) and to test the use of OERs in language MOOCs. Moodle platform was chosen for the language MOOCs by the consortium after thorough research of different providers of MOOC platforms. The main criteria for selecting Moodle were openness (open source LMS) and customizability.