Society:
It has become paramount that language didactics at Danish universities need to accommodate the challenges, which are currently present in the business environment. Furthermore, language didactics is exposed to a new type of student with very different academic prerequisites. Today's students will have to be able to adapt to a flexible and dynamic labour market, where collaborative and integrative competences are crucial in terms of facilitating knowledge sharing and acquiring new knowledge. As a result, language students need to be exposed to alternative language learning processes, if they are to enter the business world as professional communicators with a unique set of skills. The research group is currently involved in Sprogkernen – www.sprogkernen.dk


Research focus:
University pedagogy is challenged by new generations of learners who have different expectations in regard to their learning processes and whose perception of what it means to learn is different from earlier generations' perception of academic skills. They are "digital natives" and the universities need to make their learning processes relevant through creating learning situations that motivate them. UFO relevance means researching and building new, personalized, intuitive social web learning platforms that may accommodate diverse groups of learners including foreign language learners. Societal demands on university pedagogy enhance the demand for facilitating learning for large groups of students who are not academically minded, who must progress through an educational system that has not been addressing what this means to its academic responsibility and where this mismatch in expectations and pre-understanding has led to large numbers of student drop-outs.
UFO research, and in particular the StudyBook project – www.studybook.dk - will focus on improving learning processes and learning outcomes using new technologies adapted to the new categories of students, the "digital natives". UFO research will further investigate new teaching methods which can be associated with new learning platforms, new media, trans-disciplinarity, business community links, etc.
Collaboration in learning constitutes the core understandings of facilitating learning and in particular foreign language learning processes for adult learners. Relevance is created through the double mission of the UFO group's research: the creation of a Web 2.0 learning platform that accommodates today's learners' ways of interacting, communicating, sharing knowledge and research into the roles of input, collaboration, learning processes and learning outcomes that such a platform enables.
The StudyBook research project is one of the few places where social media are used to facilitate learning and foreign language learning. We distinguish ourselves through researching how bridging the gap between traditional learning research and research into foreign language learning may add to the facilitation of this through social media. The research into the design of the platform is distinctive in the sense that it offers insights into and data drawn from a platform that may be personalized and individually adapted to diverse learning situations. Simultaneously the platform allows researcher insights into input influence on student activities, problem solving strategies without this ever being intrusive. The platform meets the learner and not vice versa and this enables effective and ludic learning - this is one of the research hypotheses being tested in qualitative and quantitative data analyses.
The UFO group's commitment to excellence is seen in ao the StudyBook project partcipants' endeavours to create a unique research based platform and contribute to the endeavour of creating new teaching methods for the digitally native students and students who experience traditional academic work as a major challenge. Society's interest and the political demand for increasing numbers of upper secondary school leavers continuing at university means that traditional university pedagogy and didactics are challenged, and together with fewer funds for face-to-face interaction in the classroom the challenge of researching and developing personalized and intuitive learning tools for the university student stands out. Empirical studies that provide insights into the processes involved in successful and efficient foreign language learning in non-foreign language contexts as well as foreign language contexts helps highlight processes and means of obtaining the learning objectives set out by institutes of higher education. Recent publications in peer-reviewed journals document initial findings from pilot studies and discuss the relationship between university pedagogy, foreign language learning and the use of social media. The commitment to excellence is further underlined in the research group's initial steps towards creating national as well as international joint venture projects with already existing and emerging communities within the field of social media and university pedagogy research and through the group's membership of ao DUN's fremmedsprogspædagogiske netværk. Excellence is part of UFO thinking in our attempts to publish internationally in peer-reviewed journals as well as through the organizing of seminars and conferences at CBS aimed to disseminating information about social media learning platforms.
StudyBook research and the resulting platform exhibit creativity and imagination. Creativity is seen in openness and willingness to research and test new methods and strategies that support the university learner of the 21 century. Imagination is key also to the design of new types of assignments and other student activities that will enhance and harness learning and in the efforts put into describing and defining the role of the teacher as facilitator in an innovative learning environment. Imagination plays a central role in the research design that lies behind the StudyBook research project: in integrating multiple approaches to understanding learning - general learning theory, second language acquisition research and knowledge management research - the design of the research challenges methodologies and research parameters which are both qualitative and quantitative.
The platform and the research behind it create new links between CBS students, CBS researchers, the CBS brand, and the external (business) world through case assignments, innovative pedagogy and links to business and public organizations. It opens up for collaboration with other departments, other institutes of higher education, cross-disciplinarity research and offers a research and teaching environment that may inspire educators at other levels of educational systems.