Using Lyceum, an audio-graphic conferencing system, to talk at a distance

The aim of the project was to introduce Internet-based, real-time audio conferencing into an Open University language course, a German level 2 course (post A level) in 2002. This was the first time that online tutorials had been used in a mainstream language course. After several pilot projects (in which different media were tried out and evaluated), the medium chosen was Lyceum, a conferencing tool developed in-house, which combines audio, sev-eral graphics tools (for writing, drawing and importing and manipulating web images) and text chat. Lyceum offers virtual space for plenary sessions as well as breakout 'rooms'.The teaching methodology used involved interactive, collaborative, task-based, student-centred learning based on socio-cultural and constructivist theories as well as principles of second language acquisition (SLA)