1. This four-week course, Teaching pathways: How to teach speaking, which is intended to help with the design of speaking tasks and improve the speaking skills of your students, starts tomorrow: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teaching-pathways-how-teach-speaking

You need to register – that’s free – and you can enrol at any point in January. For participants who successfully complete all tasks and achieve a score of 70% or above in the online exercises, there’ll be a downloadable certificate of completion at the end of the course.

2. The OECD are running a series of three events on Fostering 21st-century skills in higher education – How can governments and institutions support students’ skill development? Unless you’re the leader of an institution, you may find Sessions 2 and 3 more interesting.

Session 1: Institutional perspective: Dialogue with institutional leaders on Wednesday 12^th January at 12:30 UK time: more info and registration here https://meetoecd1.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_WTUzG1yWQwa9KaVkiLhzXQ

Session 2: Approaches to 21st-century skills in Europe and North America on Wednesday 12^th January at 15:00 UK time: more info and registration here https://meetoecd1.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_X64LroVjQXmLBizAcGWnhA

Session 3: Approaches to 21st-century skills in Asia-Pacific on Thursday 13 January at 08:30 UK time: more info and registration here https://meetoecd1.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1Tnh36KJSYOAIS5MJZ2UvQ

If I taught in school, I’d be tempted to listen in to Session 2 or 3, to see what value my HE colleagues place on the work I do in school.

3. This coming Saturday, 15^th January, at 09:00 UK time, Hanoi University of Science and Technology and Coventry University will be presenting their Viet Nam Virtual Exchange for English Language Teaching (ViVEXELT) project.

More info here https://www.facebook.com/vivexelt/

registration here https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=wXVirt3MRkCyoWJFosyj7EO4mKBTgeJLur0DDnrxbaBUOTRVTUI4SFlQNTU4RkhCUlNVNUg5UDRRTy4u

and an informative blog post here https://vivexelt.com/2021/08/16/post1/

4. And, finally, five things to be optimistic about in 2022 at least according to the World Economic Forum’s positive assessment of a recent Ipsos survey of 22,000 people in 33 countries https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/most-think-2022-will-be-better-year/

Here’s the Ipsos survey itself, which has a slightly less sanguine introduction: “Of the nine questions where we have trend data since 2020, four show significant change, indicating a more optimistic view of what 2022 will bring. Nonetheless, concerns about the environment and rising prices persist. And while most expect greater COVID vaccination rates around the world, half (47%) expect a new deadly strain of the virus to appear.” https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-predictions-2022 PDF below.

And here’s a thirty-minute Ipsos discussion of the year just ended, The year in review: Making sense of 2021 https://youtu.be/HKszqZdnEH0 PDF of the report that’s being discussed below.