Multilingual Survival Kit in GIS – University of West Hungary , Department of Geoinformatics

Studies in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at the Faculty of Geo-informatics at the University of West Hungary are very specific. A good knowledge of the technical vocabulary used during the practical and fieldwork is fundamental. On the one hand the pilot aimed to prepare incoming students in the use of Hungarian. On the other hand, outgoing students also need training in German and English. Therefore the decision was made to initially develop a trilingual course in English, German and Hungarian.

Within the framework of the pilot, a wiki has been developed. Participants collaborate to develop a compilation of specific vocabulary and terms linked to the GIS topic. One teacher coaches the participants.

Each course was developed in the virtual learning environment of Moodle software and integrated into the faculties' portal where the students can access the platform. Each course also contains guidelines (requirements, how to edit in a wiki), a wiki, several forums and a questionnaire template in order to collect feedback.

A first run took place in February 2008 with a group of 4 Erasmus students. In July 2008 there were two parallel runs. One focused on English, Hungarian and German, the other on English and Russian for a specific group of people (Kazak and Tajik teachers from a Tempus project, coming to Hungary for training on GIS in August).

In the first run the students started to work directly on the wiki without too detailed guidelines, but it soon became clear that this was not the way to go: the wiki had an anarchic development, both teacher and students got lost and initial goals were not reached. Experiences from the second run show that by creating clear, step by step guidelines which are also displayed step by step and which are closely followed up by the teacher, this problem could be solved successfully. At the end, the WIKI had a large coverage of terms, the structure was balanced and the trilingual aspect was reached.

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