Educational Platforms for Creating Assignments and Supervising Students' Individual Work

This article provides a description of some teachers’ tools that can be used for creating individual tasks for students taking a course in English for Specific Purposes. Since the authors of the article teach students who aim to join creative and administrative staff of film and TV studios, the topics are chosen in accordance with VGIK’s students’ professional interests. However, we create materials that expand students’ general knowledge of the world and promote human values. Thus, students get a chance to acquire useful vocabulary and use their language skills in different situations of communication. The share of the student's individual work according to their curricula has considerably increased recently. In terms of academic hours, it is the same as for face-to-face lessons (180 ac.h. for the entire two-year course). Hence there is a need to make up assignments for individual work and supervise it. The authors do this by developing study sets in addition to using textbooks and articles in trade magazines. Every study set consists of video content aimed at developing listening or translation skills (depending on the level of the group), and a vocabulary set uploaded to the QUIZLET platform, comprehension questions, discussion topics, additional materials to read and discuss and sometimes, topics for projects and presentations. The proposed methodology has been tested at three departments of VGIK (Photography, Film Directing, and Animation and Multimedia) and has been used by the authors of the article for the last 5 years.