About The Foreign Language Technology  Project

The Five Colleges of Ohio Consortium |ProjectObjectives | Components | PressRelease

The Five Colleges of Ohio Consortium

The proposed foreign language consortium will be part of the activitiesof the recently created FiveColleges of Ohio Consortium. Established in 1995 with a grant fromthe Mellon Foundation for collaborationon library resources, the purposess of the Five Colleges consortium areto promote the broad educational and cultural objectives of the five collegesby fostering closer cooperation and understanding, to operate as an alliancefor the purpose of coordinating operation functions and administrativeservices, and to develop collaborative programs and resource sharing forthe purpose of enhancing quality and reducing individual and collectiveoperating and capital costs.

Project Objectives

The project has three major objectives:

• to increase linguistic and cultural competence for all foreign learnersin the consortium:

major goals of the project are:

a) to improve reading, writing, oral comprehension and conversational skills at all levels
b) to improve the persistence rate from introductory to advanced courses
c) to make language-learning more individualized
d) to attract students and faculty from all fields to study those languages that will strengthen their understanding of their disciplines.

• to increase the range of languages that are learned by our students:a major goal of the project will be to explore ways in which the sonsortiumcan use its common resources, and technology, to offer courses in the less-commonlytaught languages.
• to foster significant collaborations between language faculty throughoutthe consortium. Major goals of the project will be to explore waysin which language faculty might collaborate on course design and significantapplications of teaching technology, and also explore ways in which consortialschools might collaborate in joint teaching enterprises.

We expect the major outcomes of the project will include a number of significantimprovements in the quality of foreign language instruction and learningat all five colleges, increases in the numbers of students studying foreignlanguages at several of the five institutions, increases in the numberof students majoring in foreign languages, increases in the range of languagesand cultures available for study by our students, and the generation ofa number of collaborative projects in foreign language learning. We alsoexpect the project to provide the foundation for a number of student, facultyand institutional collaborations that will allow students, faculty andthe consortial colleges to enrich their pedagogy and curricular offeringin ways that would be difficult or impossible alone.

The project is designed to achieve these objectives in economical andcost effective ways. On the one hand, all the colleges in the consortiumrecognize the importance of the study of foreign languages and culturesin a liberal arts education. Three of the five colleges have a foreignlanguage requirement, and all five have committed a significant portionof their resources to foreign language study. The mission of all five collegesincludes providing students with the knowledge and skills they will needin their lives and careers, and all five acknowledge that in an increasinglyglobal economy the study of foreign languages and cultures will becomeincreasingly important. Moreover, the range of foreign languages salientfor careers in this global economy has expanded over the past two decades,an expansion that is likely to continue, and all the colleges in the consortiumhave experienced increased student interest in languages that were seldomtaught two decades ago -- Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean and Arabicfor example.

On the other hand, none of the consortial colleges can expect significantadditions to faculty size that would allow easy accommodation of theseand other emerging interests, nor does any of the five colleges expectincreases in revenue that would allow significant growth in real expenditureson foreign language instruction. Improving language learning and increasingthe range of languages taught -- thereby meeting our common mission asliberal arts colleges -- must be achieved without significant additionalcosts.

The project's objectives will also address another significant needof the language faculty at the five colleges, by providing a much broaderrange of professional colleagues for each of the language faculty. Manyof our faculty teach in small programs, and some are the sole teacher ofa given language in their college. By establishing a consortioum of languageteachers, and implementing a number of collaborative projects, we willfoster the scholarly, pedagogical and curricular collegiality essentialfor the support of our faculty members.

Components

1. Two language technology specialists will be hired, to help Ohio Five languagefaculty acquire proficiency in applying a broad range of instructionaltechnologies. They will provide the expert advice and training for alllanguage faculty engaged in the task of reconceptualizing the teachingof both language and culture. In addition, they will provide the initialtechnical support that is essential to the successful implementation ofnew technologies.
2. A workshop program will be instituted to assist faculty in learning andin applying these new technologies. The program will consist of one-dayworkshops during the academic year, and one-week workshops during the summers.Some of the workshops will be designed to instruct participants in theuse of information technology in foreign language teaching generally. Otherswill be devoted to specific languages and lanuage groups.
3. A small grant program will be instituted to underwrite collaborative projectsbetween faculty members at different institutions and between the fivecolleges. Course developments will be funded through this program, andsome broader collaborations as well. We plan to fund 30 such projects overthe four-year period of the grant.
4. A faculty mentor program will be instituted that is designed to train languagefaculty to become experts in the uses of multimedia in foreign languageteaching, so that at the end of the grant period each campus will haveone or more faculty members who will serve as mentors in the applicationof technology to language teaching and learning.
5. Multimedia facilities will be created on each campus that will allow facultymembers from each institution to explore and develop teaching applicationsof the new technologies. In addition, each campus will create languagelearning centers adequate to support those applications.

 

 

Press Release
Aug. 13, 1996

FIVE COLLEGES OF OHIO
WIN MELLON GRANT FOR LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION PROJECT

The Five Colleges of Ohio consortium of the College of Wooster, Denison,Kenyon, Oberlin and Ohio Wesleyan has received a $750,000 grant from TheAndrewW. Mellon Foundation of New York City to develop a four-year projectto strengthen foreign language learning through the collaborative use ofelectronic technology.

The primary objectives of the project are to increase the linguisticand cultural competence of our students, to increase the range of languagesstudents are able to learn during their undergraduate years, and to fostersignificant collaboration among language faculty in the Ohio Five,according to Denison President Michele Tolela Myers, who also heads theFive Colleges consortium.

In addition to the benefits of increasing the competencies of studentsin foreign languages, the colleges are looking to cost-savings from theFive Colleges collaborative efforts, Myers explains. (Last year, the OhioFive initially collaborated on a library project to link collections electronicallyand share some subscriptions to scholarly publications.)

Students will benefit not only by becoming more proficient in speakingand writing foreign languages -- in addition to developing competenciesin listening and reading -- but also more students will be able to learnsuch languages as Chinese, Korean or Arabic because of savings achievedthrough the collaboration of the colleges, the Denison president added.

In addition, faculty will be able to add significant enhancements totheir courses through collaborative course development, and be able todevote more in-class time to discussion of culture, history and literatureby shifting traditional drill and response activities to (interactive)exercises outside class.

Other unusual dimensions to the Ohio Five language collaboration projectinclude:

• First, faculty will be able to make language instruction more effective-- and interesting to the student -- through the use of information/electronictechnology.

For example, interactive computer-based tools can provide a more realisticenvironment for the use of the language. This virtual reality inmodern languages makes the learning process an active one, in which studentsuse language in both spoken and written form in a realistic context.

• Second, the potential for cost-savings in a traditional labor-intensiveliberal arts college environment where personal interaction between studentand professor is not only essential but expected, means that language courseswith small enrollments might be linked electronically and share facultyresources.

Thus, language classes with small enrollments at the various collegesand even classical languages, such as Greek and Latin, might be pooledand linked together via electronic technology on the campuses of the fivecolleges.

Nelson de Jesus, associate professor of French at Oberlin, is the initialdirector of the Mellon Project, which is formally titled Enhancing TheLanguage Curriculum Through the Collaborative Use of Information Technology.He can be reached at (440)775-8186 or by his e-mail account: Nelson.De.Jesus@oberlin.edu.

The Five Colleges of Ohio consortium was established in 1995 with anearlier grant from the Mellon Foundation. The purposes of the consortiumare to promote the broad educational and cultural objectives of the fivemember colleges by fostering closer cooperation and understanding, to operateas an alliance for the purpose of coordinating operating functions andadministrative services, and to develop collaborative academic programsand resource sharing for the purpose of enhancing quality while reducingindividual and collective operating and capital costs.

 

© 2002 Ohio 5 Foreign Language Technology Project
Last revision: 10/03/00