This page is no longer being maintained. It is being made available for historical purposes.
Visit https://www.ohio5.org to return to the main site.

Ohio 5 Foreign Language Technology Project

About The Foreign Language Technology  Project

The Five Colleges of Ohio Consortium |Project Objectives | Components | Press Release

The Five Colleges of Ohio Consortium

The proposed foreign language consortium will be part of the activities of the recently created Five Colleges of Ohio Consortium. Established in 1995 with a grant from the Mellon Foundation for collaboration on library resources, the purposes of the Five Colleges consortium are to promote the broad educational and cultural objectives of the five colleges by fostering closer cooperation and understanding, to operate as an alliance for the purpose of coordinating operation functions and administrative services, and to develop collaborative programs and resource sharing for the purpose of enhancing quality and reducing individual and collective operating and capital costs.

Project Objectives

The project has three major objectives:

  1. to increase linguistic and cultural competence for all foreign learners in 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.

  1. 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 sonsortium can use its common resources, and technology, to offer courses in the less-commonly taught languages.
  2. to foster significant collaborations between language faculty throughout the consortium. Major goals of the project will be to explore ways in which language faculty might collaborate on course design and significant applications of teaching technology, and also explore ways in which consortial schools might collaborate in joint teaching enterprises.

We expect the major outcomes of the project will include a number of significant improvements in the quality of foreign language instruction and learning at all five colleges, increases in the numbers of students studying foreign languages at several of the five institutions, increases in the number of students majoring in foreign languages, increases in the range of languages and 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, faculty and institutional collaborations that will allow students, faculty and the consortial colleges to enrich their pedagogy and curricular offering in ways that would be difficult or impossible alone.

The project is designed to achieve these objectives in economical and cost effective ways. On the one hand, all the colleges in the consortium recognize the importance of the study of foreign languages and cultures in a liberal arts education. Three of the five colleges have a foreign language requirement, and all five have committed a significant portion of their resources to foreign language study. The mission of all five colleges includes providing students with the knowledge and skills they will need in their lives and careers, and all five acknowledge that in an increasingly global economy the study of foreign languages and cultures will become increasingly important. Moreover, the range of foreign languages salient for 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 consortium have experienced increased student interest in languages that were seldom taught two decades ago -- Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean and Arabic for example.

On the other hand, none of the consortial colleges can expect significant additions to faculty size that would allow easy accommodation of these and other emerging interests, nor does any of the five colleges expect increases in revenue that would allow significant growth in real expenditures on foreign language instruction. Improving language learning and increasing the range of languages taught -- thereby meeting our common mission as liberal arts colleges -- must be achieved without significant additional costs.

The project's objectives will also address another significant need of the language faculty at the five colleges, by providing a much broader range of professional colleagues for each of the language faculty. Many of our faculty teach in small programs, and some are the sole teacher of a given language in their college. By establishing a consortium of language teachers, and implementing a number of collaborative projects, we will foster the scholarly, pedagogical and curricular collegiality essential for the support of our faculty members.

Components

  1. Two language technology specialists will be hired, to help Ohio Five language faculty acquire proficiency in applying a broad range of instructional technologies. They will provide the expert advice and training for all language faculty engaged in the task of reconceptualizing the teaching of both language and culture. In addition, they will provide the initial technical support that is essential to the successful implementation of new technologies.
  2. A workshop program will be instituted to assist faculty in learning and in applying these new technologies. The program will consist of one-day workshops during the academic year, and one-week workshops during the summers. Some of the workshops will be designed to instruct participants in the use of information technology in foreign language teaching generally. Others will be devoted to specific languages and language groups.
  3. A small grant program will be instituted to underwrite collaborative projects between faculty members at different institutions and between the five colleges. Course developments will be funded through this program, and some broader collaborations as well. We plan to fund 30 such projects over the four-year period of the grant.
  4. A faculty mentor program will be instituted that is designed to train language faculty to become experts in the uses of multimedia in foreign language teaching, so that at the end of the grant period each campus will have one or more faculty members who will serve as mentors in the application of technology to language teaching and learning.
  5. Multimedia facilities will be created on each campus that will allow faculty members from each institution to explore and develop teaching applications of the new technologies. In addition, each campus will create language learning 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:

  1. 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.

  1. 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