HandsOnTurkish is an interactive, ‘hands-on’ eLearning course of Turkish primarily for vocational and business learners.
The project was awarded European funding based on the growing importance of Turkey on the world stage, the growing Turkish economy and thus the new opportunities for trade and investment for European businesses. Combined with these opportunities are, naturally, potential challenges of linguistic and cultural differences which may hinder smooth trade.
The HandsOnTurkish project aims to tackle this issue and provide the materials necessary to give European businesses the cultural and linguistic training they need.
The course is already available online, for iPad and for android smartphones.
Jeroen, Locusta and I met in Amsterdam for the final meeting of 2014. We were booked into the Fashion Hotel Amsterdam which provided excellent settings for working (plenty of desks, plenty of plug sockets, comfortable chairs and fast internet). The hotel is presumably targeted towards the fashion industry being next to some fashion centres and there were plenty of tall beautiful women walking around in skinny jeans and jackets.
Nonetheless, the Agenda was two entire A4 pages of notes, so we had plenty to do.
We started off with a round-up of previous developments:
- The Turkish Android app is on the appstore and will be updated with further mother languages soon.
- The eqequivalent Turkish iPhone app has now been successfully tested on iPhones and iPads (at 1x and 2x zoom).
- Recording functions have been successfully tested on iOS.
- The latest version of the online course is almost ready for testing.
- The multi-lingual websites were installed but required some updating. So far this includued:
- Italian version: turconline.it
- Dutch version: praktischturks.nl
- French version: turcpratique.com
- English version: HandsOnTurkish.com
- German version: tuerkisch-online.eu (requires new domain name)
- All websites have received a make-over and extra content.
- Issues with the embedding required urgent attention.
The next day, Jeroen and I sat down to focus on the smartphone apps and focus on getting the iOS app on the market asap with extra content and multilingualism and recording functions. We then discussed the flash card app and thrashed out the possible requirements. Both us had learnt a few languages so it wasn’t difficult to write down exactly what we would’ve required and still do need for our own personal language learning.
Whilst this continued, Locusta sorted the language selection options in the online version.
After the break, we drafted the first wire frames and assessed the language words that we would need. This, in turn, will be double checked with Udo for his blessings from a pedagogical perspective.
After a pleasant meal in Leideplein, Jeroen returned to his residence in the south of Holland.
Locusta and I continued working the next day but it was more of a working session which required both of us on our screens checking and refining as much as possible.
- At the end of the meeting we had:
- updated the interface
- tested new fonts
- clarified the new vocabulary exercises
- updated the home menu
- externalised font colour codes into the global.xml
- added the langauge selection
- developed a new PHP embed code
- ensured consistency across the multi-lingual websites
- planned and prioritised the next steps
This highly constructive meeting concluded the final round of meetings of 2014. Further news and updates related to the HandsOnTurkish project can be read here and on the website:
