“Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it” — Christopher Morley
I've often thought that some subjects are more conducive than others to learning online or otherwise at a distance. I've said in the past that many people might prefer to learn subjects like math, accounting, economics, and even some aspects of computer science in a classroom, but that humanities, social sciences, literature, and the like are at least as easy to do online and sometimes easier.
My reasoning is that those subjects I think of as difficult to do by distance are ones where students are likely to ask a series of questions in a row to try to zero in on understanding of the material. Since most online and distance learning takes place asynchronously, meaning that the participants are not all online at the same time, a series of exchanges that might take five minutes in a classroom might take five days online. It's the other side of the coin to the convenience of logging on whenever it's convenient.
That asynchronous attribute makes another set of subjects an interesting choice to study online: foreign languages. In an opinion piece at Inside Higher Ed today, Dan Edelstein, an assistant professor of French at Stanford University, laments the decline of foreign language instruction at universities generally, and refers to a recent initiative by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to move their introductory Spanish courses online as a sign of this decline.
Now, we eLearners know that there are many faculty members who don't like much of anything about online study, and that's understandable, people natually fear new things that conflict with the old ways they've been using for so long. So are the misgivings about foreign language study by distance legitimate? I think to an extent that they are. Many of the naysayers make a good point, that an important part of learning a foreign language is the ability to be immersed among others who are also speaking it. That's tough to do with a text-based model of online course that consists mostly of readings, discussion boards, and written examinations.
But that doesn't mean that foreign languages can't be studied at all without physical proximity. I would suggest to schools that are considering teaching them online to make better use of multimedia so that students get a real sense of how the language is supposed to sound, and to require students to participate in live audio online chats among one another and with their instructors using headsets. It's not that difficult to add these additional elements to online courses, especially since in most cases a headset can be purchased for less than twenty dollars and is as easy to use as simply plugging it into one's computer.
So for written languages like Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and the like, I think there's no reason for them not to be studied online, even asynchronously. And I'll even maintain cautious optimism that modern conversational languages can be learned effectively online, so long as instructional designers and faculty members break out some of the newer tools in the eLearning toolbox.
Next up, I move a little closer to switching from ATSU to Cape Peninsula.
Image courtesy of Slugger O'Toole