New Features for the MEC

This new edition has already generated great interest and discussion throughout the English Language Teaching (ELT) industry. It has been reviewed in various teaching magazines and journals throughout the summer, including 'English Teaching Matters', the ‘BESIG Issues’ journal and the ‘ELGazette’, and has recently been adopted by a number of prestigious new customers, including the International House World Organisation (IHWO) based in London.

In this month’s newsletter we look in greater detail at two of the new, improved features of MEC in order to illustrate why it is currently the talk of the ELT town.

1. New Courses ― Easier to Use

The great innovation of the Macmillan English Campus is that it supports and enables blended learning. That is, teachers using it have the freedom to select and combine electronic resources in any way they choose. They can use MEC to create entirely new lessons of their own; or they can use it to support a coursebook from any publisher already being used in the classroom.

Of course, the new edition retains this blended learning approach. MEC can still be used to match teachers’ requirements exactly.

But it also makes life a little easier. MEC has introduced six pre-set courses that are ready to use as soon as the teacher logs in. These courses are set at clearly defined levels, corresponding approximately to the standard Council of Europe learning levels (as shown in the figure below).

These new courses are of real benefit to smaller language institutions in particular, since these institutions may not be have been previously able to allocate a member of staff to full-time ‘course design’. Teachers can ask their students to work through the pre-set courses on their own, safe in the knowledge that they provide learning material at the right language level. Alternatively, the teacher can edit the courses as much or as little as they wish, so that they fit even more ‘snugly’ alongside their existing print coursebooks or institution curriculum.

2. New Markbook ― Greater Control for the Teacher

Another unique feature of MEC is its interactive markbook. The markbook enables teachers to view and measure the progress of their students as they work through a course.

In the new edition, this feature has been improved even further!

The markbook now contains a user-friendly interface, including a graphical representation of each student's progress (see the screenshot on the right). This means that the teacher can track all members of their assigned class at a glance and see how they score as they work through their assigned MEC resources.

In addition, all the results and data from the student's markbook can now be exported at the touch of a button. This means that the teacher can print out or make modifications to the class in any format they choose.

These two new features exemplify why the Macmillan English Campus remains the foremost e-learning destination for teachers and students across the world.

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