CourseShare at 20: How the Big Ten Is Transforming Language Education

“Learning languages is vital for deepening our understanding of other cultures, because language is a repository for culture and the shared experience of other cultures, but it is also enormously beneficial for the intellectual development of students,” says Chris Long, the provost and senior vice president at the University of Oregon. “Language learning is one of the indicators of student success.”

For more than 20 years, the Big Ten Academic Alliance has been connecting students across its member institutions with instruction for “less-commonly taught languages” or LCTLs through its CourseShare program. While individual institutions may have difficulty providing multiple LCTLs to their students, the collaborative efforts of the Big Ten Academic Alliance allow students across the member universities to access instruction.

Founded in 1958 as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the consortium almost immediately focused on sharing resources for language instruction between member institutions. Many institutions struggled to find instructors in languages such as Bengali or Turkish and to enroll enough students to make hiring an instructor to teach LCTLs viable.

Initially, summer language institutes were the answer. Beginning in 1973, doctoral candidates could participate in a Traveling Language Scholars Program, a compressed one-semester course at another institution. As the name suggests, students traveled to other institutions to study LCTLs, which were primarily in African and South Asian languages.

In 1986, the Foreign Languages Enhancement Program was created and, annually, 33 scholarships were awarded in more than 40 different languages. Students traveled to another university to participate in a standard-length language course. For students who had another Big Ten university nearby, the program could be convenient, but many students used the scholarships to pay for lodging and travel.

“We have a Michigan Flyer bus that goes between Michigan State University and the University of Michigan,” said Danielle Steider, the coordinator of the Less-Commonly Taught Languages Program at MSU. “So, for us that worked pretty well.”

Technological advances in the 1990s reversed the instructional flow: students no longer had to travel for instruction. In 2003, the fledgling internet allowed students to receive compressed video and language instruction at their home institution. Learning was still done at a specific time in a classroom with a video projector, a screen, and an instructor who could troubleshoot technical issues and help students navigate learning. That year, the Big Ten Academic Alliance began a CourseShare Program pilot to allow institutions to cross-register students, provide and accept grades, and credit transfer. For all campuses involved, CourseShare has made finding courses and instructors, credit transfer, grading, and related infrastructure relatively seamless.

“When we started out it was a synchronous learning experience and we were working on identifying classrooms, finding video cameras, getting the time synchronized across time zones and with different academic calendars, semesters, or terms, depending on the university,” Long explained.

With a diversified U.S. population, the demand for heritage languages, like Vietnamese and Indigenous languages, has increased. Advances in technology and language pedagogy have made it possible to move from strictly classroom-based instruction to synchronous online videoconferencing, with the COVID-19 pandemic providing impetus for stronger delivery methods.

“When all of the students are on Zoom, everybody’s equal,” Steider said. “There’s an equality in the classroom and it’s easier on the teacher, and it’s better for the students. The class can develop a community, and all the students feel like they’re getting the same education.”

“With regard to less-commonly taught languages, the challenge that we have—and this is why the Big Ten Academic Alliance is so important—is that we can’t get to a sustainable scale for the teaching of all of these languages,” Long said. “Often we’ll have two to three students at one university, another two to three at another, and also at a third, so by combining them into a single class, you can get critical mass to offer more courses at a higher level of competency.”

A grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has enabled the CourseShare program to expand its offerings and helped coordinate curriculum development across the consortium.

“The Mellon LCTL Partnership grant has allowed the language coordinators and the center directors across the Big Ten Academic Alliance to connect with one another and to build relationships of trust so that we can develop opportunities for higher levels of competency through a coordinated approach. What we’ve worked toward is to move from sharing individual courses to coordinating around the curriculum,” Long said. “Yes, there is an economy of scale, but also, and perhaps more importantly, we have been able to cultivate relationships of trust across the BTAA that have deepened our capacity to collaborate.

“Over time, we have been able to coordinate the work, and this has been at the heart of the vision of the CourseShare model, where we are drawing on the full resources of all the universities from a faculty standpoint and a student interest standpoint to ensure these languages are sustained and continue to provide education to our students,” Long said.

“I think CourseShare is a hidden gem in many ways. I would love to see all students be able to pursue their home language or desired language and eventually access it through CourseShare. The fact that we can make so many connections and that so many students are being served through the program, that is a real testament to the power of the CourseShare network,” said Emily Heidrich Uebel, project manager for the LCTL and Indigenous Languages Partnership, the Mellon project based at MSU.

In addition to the CourseShare Program’s 20th anniversary, this year also saw the beginning of new collaborative efforts in language education with the hosting of the Big Ten Academic Alliance Language Education Summit. Supported by the deans of liberal arts and sciences colleges, the summit brought together faculty and language center leaders with K-12 representatives to discuss the changing landscape of language education at all levels.

by: Maeve Reilly

For more on the Big Ten Academic Alliance and CourseShare, contact: info@btaa.org