The Fellowships I panel will include four presentations:
The George Washington University's Center for International Business Education and Research and its business language courses in both commonly and less commonly taught languages;
Michigan State University's development of a distance-learning environment and its research comparing the features of that environment with face-to-face language learning;
The North Carolina Center for South Asian Studies' consortial distance-learning teaching of Hindi-Urdu, suggesting a set of best practices;
Yale University's flexible model for its Directed Language Study (DLS) program providing expert support for students learning languages for which Yale has no faculty, and a discussion of a variety of models for addressing the urgent need for more programs in more languages for students learning for more different purposes than ever before.
The purpose of this panel is to suggest a range of ways in which universities are seeking to establish programs in low-enrollment languages, especially in studying these for "special purposes". Several different ways to harness technology to these initiatives will be described, as will the challenges or obstacles, the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches. The wrap-up discussion will explore the extensibility of the models
presented: under what circumstances, at what kind of university, does which model seem to work best? Which models might "scale up" best? What does a university need to establish such a program with confidence of its continuing excellence and usefulness?
Panelist, Director of the UC Language Consortium and Professor of Spanish, Department of Spanish and the UC Language Consortium, University of California - Davis
International Education Programs Service
U.S. Department of Education
Office of Postsecondary Education
1990 K Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20006-8521
Phone: (202) 502-7700
