Who is ICTNLE for?
- While typical language learners are also catered for, contents target mostly needs in business English, public speaking, negotiations, mock interviews.
- Some 30-40% of current students are mature professionals who have already completed one or more degrees or aspire to pursue an MBA at a prestigious university. Such high flyers won't stay engaged long if gamification or relevant scenarios don't challenge their confidence to navigate cross-cultural hurdles (by recycling for instance G.Hofstede's dimensions).
- The rationale is simple: since asynchronous activities such as open clozes, match-it, etc, at higher levels of proficiency are not appealing any more it is essential to concentrate on tools that swiftly enable customising existing templates to individual needs. ICTNLE is for teachers and content creators with IT hard skills who crave to satisfy such niche market.
How is AI deployed?
- Using prompt engineering to populate various templates in xml (presentation, case study, role play...)
- Including random selection (to avoid predictable, mechanical, monotonous repetition) of pre-defined activities (reading / listening comprehension, eliciting questions, McKinsey/STAR/CARL approaches, SWOT analysis...)
- Mitigating AI anonymous formatting with personalised, company or customer oriented examples (e.g. culture-related communication breakdown)
- Human refining and cultural re-localising to satisfy learners' expectations, such as practising registers (formal, informal, colloquial, assertive, tentative...)
- More on AI prompt engineering will be published in the Training & Coaching section.
How does ICTNLE integrate into LMS such as Moodle?
- Contents in xml (and occasional javascript) are parsed by php to display in html format via Moodle's URL module
- The CMS (content management system) from ICTNLE began as LAMP (Linux Apache Mysl/MariaDb Php) and can be run as a stand-alone web-site (as demonstrated in the Archives deprecated section) or embedded into any existing LMS via a simple iframe. Use of html purifier is highly recommended if not embedded.
- Current integration into Moodle consisted in reverse-engineering an exported course in its native mbz (tar.gz) format and parsing (repackaging) ICTNLE xml contents to run with php moosh.php course-restore -e course.mbz #courseid thanks to Moosh (Moodle Shell) by Tomasz Muras.
- Editing xml contents in Vim (or any text editor of your choice) is more convenient than Moodle in a web-browser if you have experience in cli (command line interface such as Vim's magic wand as explained by Rob Muhlestein) and takes only a few seconds depending if you are updating the database on your localhost and sharing web contents from your laptop for example, or uploading via ssh contents & running Moosh on a remote server (e.g. web hosting).
- Most importantly, although this solution is nowhere close to the myriad of (fantastic) plugins provided by the Moodle community, it can be scripted and is scalable (unlike navigating through a web interface in Moodle).
- Scripts & samples should be available on github 2025-2026.
- More on instructional design will be published in the Training & Coaching section.
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Examples to update the course_log.xml and the database from within vim
:grep -i 'mixed conditionals' *xml // find keywords
:cl // list all occurrences
:cc# // go to occurrence #
vat(tag) // select & copy tag contents
leader g // go back to previous buffer
pat // paste tag contents
:w // write (i.e. save updates in your xml file)
:! php $your_path/xml2mbz_update.php $target/course_log.xml // create mbz file
:! php $your_path/moosh.php \
course-restore -e $target/course_log.mbz #courseid // update database
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What are the USPs (unique selling points) of the ICTNLE solution?
- Unlike many on-line ELT (English Language Teaching) platforms, format & activities are designed mostly for live delivery, and literally updating contents tailored to learners' needs in real time. Traditional activities needed in a flipped session or blended context are of course still available.
- Examples of ad-hoc contents customisation include adding new questions and answers in communicative activities, new lexical material to the downloadable word list for SRS (space repetition software) thanks to a ubiquitous php preg_replace script embedded into the page, and use of java-script based, hide-show functions to display in an incremental way delayed error correction at the end of each session.
- Each course & session feature modules which can be skipped depending on level relevance, or on the contrary repeated by grading tasks with increasing difficulty (e.g. multiple answers or only gapped sentences) via cli instead of the web-browser. There is not a single book but as many books (or courses) as learners.
- Finding relevant target language examples on the spur of the moment is just a matter of running grep (reminiscent of control find) through xml files that have been indexed over the years to facilitate instant access.
ICTNLE integration into Moodle to provide timely feedback is particularly relevant in more personalised courses as Job hunting, relocating, mock interviews.
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