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The effort was certainly worthwhile. However, this type of project has to
be carried out progressively, in stages and the outcome has to be
realistic and not too ambitious with the time-scale.
The major difficulty in this project has been to have time free from
teaching to devote to this project. This type of project is very
time-consuming as it involves reading/research, selection of topics,
designing exercises compatible with the computer system, writing up the
activities, testing, improving etc. Departments are only willing to
allocate time to their staff for this type of research if the time is
"bought" by funding. The funding available by WELL does not cover the time
we have spent on this project as was pointed out earlier. There is a
difficult balance to strike here, and it would seem to me that the amount
of funding should perhaps reflect more closely the time spent developing a
project.
The second problem was that we were not told until the 11th November that
our proposal had been successful by the WELL pannel. This made us start
later than planned. It would have been better to have started in September
before teaching commenced.
Third, we had to overcome practical obstacles with the Department of
Learning Support at our university like for example obtaining the
permission to take out of the Learning Centre, which gets very crowded and
noisy during term time, French newspapers and magazines.
Fourth, our languages' learning adviser had to travel to another site in
order to digitalise the news extracts on video. There is still work to be
done in this area since the quality of the image and sound are not always
good and students experienced problems in these areas.
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