The app was co-designed with a group of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in the EU, so it is particularly suitable for helping to integrate these groups into EU societies, and for home country members to learn more about the communities in their local area. Immigrants can learn to create the host country’s cultural activities to learn about the language and vice versa. Secondly, immigrants can produce their own cultural activities in their own language using the authoring tool. People can also work online on building cultural activities with experts from the home country. These are then freely available for use by both community members, thus enabling mutual understanding and 2-way integration.

A problem for some migrant communities is that the young generation do not always learn the language and culture of the older generation, whilst the elders are often lacking in digital skills. The ENACT Web App enables the learning and inter-generational exchange of languages and cultural activities by means of digital technology. Young people with digital skills can work with older, nondigital family members to upload traditional cultural activities in the heritage language onto the system in terms of audio/video recordings and texts, thus enabling intergenerational skills and knowledge exchanges. The authoring tool is ideal for skills exchanges, so the older generation learns the digital skills and the younger generation learns the heritage activity and language, where appropriate. The infrastructure has been set up so that any number of new cultural activities can be added in any language, country and culture in the EU and beyond, using the authoring tool.

If you take part in any kind of cultural activity – sewing, dancing, singing, making crafts etc. - then you may want an easy way of showing other people how to do your activity and what it means in your culture. In particular, you may want your young generation to learn your activity and the language used in it. If so, the ENACT Web App offers an easy way of doing this. Make videos of your activity as well as audio, photos and text, and use the authoring tool to make a package that anyone anywhere can use to learn about your activity, language and culture. Your young people may be more interested in learning about it if they see it online!

UNESCO’s definition of cultural heritage “includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts.” We hope to promote all of these with the ENACT Web App.

Integrating cultural tasks into the curriculum for language learning and/or crosscultural learning as an occasional, complementary activity offers opportunities on many levels to teachers around the world. It can be helpful in bringing the cultures and languages of countries to life and in preparing students for an overseas trip as it helps engage them with the culture and language in advance. The authoring software can be used by teachers to input their own cultural activities so that their students can learn specific language points.

A great project for students is for them to input their own favourite cultural activities in their own language, using the ENACT author. Project work could also involve students producing their own activities from their own culture to present to a worldwide audience, with the choice of using their own L1 (with captions or subtitles) or English as a Lingua Franca. Digital skills can also be developed by using the ENACT authoring software, which was designed to develop a wide range of digital skills using the DIGCOMP 2.1 framework. Use our digital skills certification system to acknowledge student's digital skills development.

The long term aim of the ENACT Web App is to build up a bank of cultural language learning tasks available for free worldwide, covering as many languages, cultures and countries as possible, promoting cross cultural understanding and communication. The ENACT Web App and website provide a free infrastructure which can be used by all language and culture enthusiasts from around the world. We therefore encourage everyone to add their own cultural activity in their own language, culture using the author software so that people all over the world can learn from them — and to encourage this, there is an annual ENACT Web App prize for the best cultural language learning activity. Reciprocity is built into the app: any number of new activities can be added in any language, any country and any culture around the world, using the authoring software – no culture has priority. ENACT is therefore a suitable vehicle for promoting cultural exchange and understanding around the world.

Finally, doing cultural activities for language learning is great fun, a real-world, gritty learning experience involving all 5 senses in the course of producing something with your hands and bodies. This cannot be appreciated by simply reading instructions or reviewing the app online, so why not find a workspace, choose an activity in a new foreign language, and see what you learn!

Internationalisation at higher education (HE) contributes to international, intercultural, and global dimensions of teaching. It increases quality of education by raising students’ international outlook and intercultural capabilities. Yet vast majority of HE students lack resources to participate in study abroad and mobility programmes and miss international opportunities. University teachers can use the ENACT web app to mobilise students’ intercultural understanding and knowledge of cultures around the word and increase their awareness of interculturality. The ENACT web app can be used for teaching activities as part of a wide range of programmes and courses with a focus on languages, cultures, and intercultural communication. Whilst students can individually explore and create cultural activities on the web app and participate in the ENACT community, you can also use the ENACT app as part of a virtual exchange to facilitate international collaboration between your students and students from another institution in another country. To learn more about how we are implementing the web app for virtual exchange, read our blog post and contact us at enacteuropa@newcastle.ac.uk

Is service learning and community engagement important at your university? Another reason for you to use the ENACT web app in your teaching is to enhance your students’ engagement with the local community. We are developing a model for the ENACT app to be used for service learning programmes at higher education. The ENACT web app is designed to foster social integration and two-way intercultural and intergenerational exchange of languages, cultures, and digital skills. Working with local organisations, your students can act as facilitators to help intercultural or intergenerational pairs to work together to create their cultural activities on the ENACT app. You can use our training materials and our academic recognition tools to acknowledge your students’ community engagement in their academic learning. Our materials to encourage for purposeful civic learning will soon be available on the Outputs section on our website.