Language teaching and learning at Arizona State University face a number of challenges; some of these are a natural outgrowth of trends in higher education in the United States (the emphasis on STEM, “global Englishes”, and a creeping utilitarianism in the curriculum). Others are more specific to the state and local environments that ASU inhabits. The School of International Letters & Cultures (SILC) is meeting these challenges in several different ways, including short format courses and hybrid language instruction. Another of these is an effort to fundamentally re-examine online language instruction and to redesign from the ground up a pilot intermediate language course that will serve as a model for other online language courses.
Online instruction, whether within the School or via ASUOnline, is likely to be a major area of enrollment growth in language teaching at ASU. High-credit classes that need to meet more than twice or three times a week are more and more difficult to schedule, as the availability of physical classroom space has had trouble keeping up with burgeoning on-campus enrollments. A look at President Crow’s projections of revenue in the April 2015 Strategic Enterprise Report bears this out: from a current 6% of the University’s revenue, online tuition and fees are targeted to rise to 11% by 2020, or from $84M to $231M. SILC continues to respond to these challenges along a couple of avenues: development of an ASUOnline Spanish BA and increased online courses delivered by the School in a variety of languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Romanian.
However, because of the communicative, experiential, and social nature inherent in the courses we offer, SILC has to deliver the most difficult skills to teach online, first. These skills include speaking, listening, reading, and writing in the target language. We are only then able to offer courses with a greater focus on literary and cultural content that are more easily taught in a distance education model. In terms of the curriculum, there is no abundance of low-hanging fruit to be harvested easily, as in other disciplines. The tools and approaches to address online language learning don’t exist in the same settled space as those for content courses do. Lecture capture and PDF readings, asynchronous discussions and final papers aren’t the core of language learning, which is fundamentally communicative and social.
A team of SILC faculty and staff decided to approach the issue of online language instruction from a different perspective, one that extends beyond models currently in use via ASUOnline and other online course providers. Carla Ghanem, Rebecca Berber-McNeill, David Parks and Andrew Ross wanted to develop an online language course without the preconditions that come with translating face-to-face instruction directly into another modality. We selected an intermediate German course as the basis for our pilot project -- using communicative practices and approaches, we want to see how online instruction can deliver the same measured outcomes and meet the same objectives as face-to-face language courses.
Find out how we’re changing the online language course in Part 2 of this post, coming soon to SILC Global Intersections.
