The EOI Madrid-Jesús Maestro is a publicly-funded institution for language learning. Established in 1911, it is the flagship of Spain’s national network of language schools catering for adult education. A total of 21 languages are taught, including all major European languages, Spanish for foreign speakers and other Spanish languages, and Arabic, Chinese and Japanese. There are over 120 teachers and 19 other members of staff who serve an annual enrollment of over 7000 students spread in the 16 to 60+ age range and comprised of more than 50 nationalities. The school is located northeast of town, in a thrilling neighbourhood in close proximity to both downtown Madrid and the University campuses. 

We have already developed four Erasmus+ KA1 projects —including partnership in a consortium— where our teachers followed courses and job-shadowing activities in various countries, and we are now taking the first steps towards coordinating a KA2 project (204).

The backbone of the initiative is our school’s plan to implement a hybrid, dual learning model that will allow students to follow our standard face-to-face courses by synchronously attending the same lessons through the internet. Some pilot courses will soon be launched. With this model, we intend to attract new students, specially –but not only– to our less-demanded languages. We believe that the removal of geographical constraints may help bring together otherwise disperse potential learners.

We are looking for partners for a KA204 Erasmus+ project on this subject. Our project will focus on the technological and academic challenges of serving physically-present and distance learners synchronously, and on how those two learning environments can be truly fused in a single, enriched learning community. The demands placed on teachers and students will be researched, with the aim of producing relevant literature, and transferrable experiences and toolkits. 

We also welcome institutions that would like to pursue integrated-teaching scenarios, in which learners of, say, country A’s language in countries B and C may cooperate in joint lessons or other learning activities or projects over the internet, which would, on a second stage, lead to coordinated students’ visits to country A. The field of study here would focus on the effects of language learning from a multi European perspective.