Fit for the job market? Teaching transferable skills to future language experts
An account of the 2nd UPKSILLS multiplier event
In this post:
- A description of the day’s sessions
- Slides by presenters
- Links to video recordings
UPSKILLS, the view from the inside and from the outside
Presentation slides
Recordings, first session
The project’s building blocks and the (preliminary) results

Finally, Stavros Assimakopoulos presented the fourth intellectual output, focusing on Educational games. Starting from the lessons learned from our needs analysis, he showed how educational games and gamification can provide a context for the integration various transferable skills, also addressing the social and group-related aspects of the issue. He further discussed the typology of educational games which play a role in UPSKILLS, as well as the general approach to gamification of all UPSKILLS learning content.
This section was closed by a Q&A and discussion round, in which the participants asked about the specifics of the project, and gave us their views on the strong points and challenges of the project.
Recordings, second session
Zooming in on UPSKILLS learning content
Recordings, third session, part 1

Recordings, third session, part 2

The UPSKILLS profile
Concluding remarks
The event successfully communicated the intended information to the target group. Having started from the broad picture of the UPSKILLS project, it first narrowed the attention to each of its intellectual outputs, in order to finally focus on the intellectual output dealing with learning content. Various aspects of this component of the project were presented and discussed, from different approaches, via different (interdisciplinary) domains of linguistics to concrete content blocks. The audience showed strong interest in the presented content and engaged in discussions. Some of the challenges pointed out include the difficulty to wake the interest in students of language-related programs for content related to statistics, experimental and corpus methodology, or programming, the room to fit in the additional skills in already overloaded curricula and syllabi, as well as the challenges that such materials present for teachers trained in the traditional philological aproaches. The consensus emerged that these challenges are real, but that the benefits from the principles and materials that are being developed are sufficiently high to support the effort needed and motivate all the participants.
Posted by Boban Arsenijević and Marko Simonović (UniGraz team)
Many thanks to David Bordon for editing the recordings.
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