I was responsible for conceptual and look & feel design, supervising a student programmer in the implementation of the student (content consumption) and instructor (content creation) interfaces, finalizing the codebase, setting up the server infrastructure, and working with our learning support team to transition the project into a production service.

The “ProComp” tool aims to enhance students’ comprehension and pronunciation, and is being used in a number of language courses at UBC. The tool allows students to record their voices, compare their pronunciations with sample recordings, or answers questions. The English meaning of each foreign language phrases can also be shown to student in real time along with the source phrase to help improve comprehension. Procomp can be used in conjunction with language labs or by adding a direct oral component to a language curriculum, and can be easily incorporated into any learning management system.

Instructors can create their own oral component in any given language of their choice with a content creation tool. Several datasets each containing thousands of phrases are being managed and delivered on Procomp.

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Features:

• Text shows in the background as the audio plays
• Word-by-word paragraph highlighting synchronized with audio
• Immediate comparison between student recording with model answer recording
• “Hands-free” practice option for students to auto-play all exercises

Example Use Cases:

Practicing pronunciation

1. Student listens to a sentence (pre-recorded by the instructor) in the application
2. Student repeats the sentence orally through a microphone
3. Student listens to the sentence (pre-recorded by the instructor) immediately after again

Responding to contextual questions

1. Student listens to audio files (pre-recorded by the instructor) in the application that ask them particular context questions (i.e. What time did James arrive home from the airport?’)
2. Student answers the question orally through a microphone (i.e James arrived home from the airport at 6:30″)
3. Student receives the correct answer (pre-recorded by the instructor) immediately after their answer (i.e. James arrived home from the airport at 7:00″)

This tool is designed so that students can do these exercises repeatedly at their own leisure while being able to immediately receive the correct answer or pronunciation.