The University announced a partnership with Duke University Monday that will allow students to use videoconferencing technology to study rare languages. Starting in the fall, University students will be able to take Duke’s course on Creole, and Duke students will be able to study Tibetan language through the University.
The news might seem minor: it’s unlikely that more than a handful of students from each school will take advantage of this opportunity. But judging from the information the University has released so far—the two schools are still finalizing the program’s details—the language-class exchange is an excellent example of how universities should approach three important areas: rare language education, partnerships with other schools, and technology as a means of enhancing learning.
Offering even a fraction of all the world’s languages is a difficult task for any university. And to add another language to a school’s course offerings requires a significant investment. If, say, the University wanted to offer courses in Turkish, it could not simply hire a single rogue scholar to be a part of the school’s Eastern European studies efforts. Language education requires multiple course levels to accommodate students of varying proficiencies and to provide for students moving deeper into the language. Expanding the school’s language offerings would thus entail hiring multiple faculty members. Such an effort may be cost-prohibitive, especially for more rare languages that few students might take.
Because expanding language offerings requires more than a casual interest on the part of a school’s academic leaders, language education faces a bind when it comes to the planet’s more atypical tongues. But it is difficult to guess which languages might become crucial in the realms of diplomacy, science and literature. Rare is the school that offered Urdu 30 years ago, but the U.S. government has now designated Pakistan’s national tongue a “critical language.” And even if a language does not become important in terms of security or international affairs, rare languages still serve as valuable points of entry into less-understood cultures.
The University’s partnership with Duke stands as a testament to the significant role foreign languages play in liberal-arts education. The partnership helps shield rare-language education from economic vicissitudes by drawing more attention and more intellectual and financial investment to Duke’s Creole offerings and the University’s Tibetan studies program.
In addition to demonstrating a smart-minded approach to rare languages, the initiative also showcases an appropriate attitude toward inter-university partnership. Collaboration between schools and between scholars is an important part of advancing the sum of human knowledge. Individual universities need not be intellectual islands. But collaboration for the sake of collaboration—or for expanding the University’s global reach—looks good for administrators but provides little in the way of direct benefits to students and faculty. The partnership with Duke, in contrast, has a concrete purpose. What’s more, both schools will gain from it.
The initiative is not collaboration for the sake of touting a strategic partnership; neither is it technology promotion for the sake of flaunting digital literacy. The program’s incorporation of video technology is refreshingly fitting. Students taking classes at a remote school will join their classrooms in real time via video cameras and a large screen. For this initiative, academic leaders are incorporating technology into the classroom not to prove relevance but rather to meet an immediate need. And the videoconferencing tools students will use will allow them to engage intimately with professors at other schools: The program attempts to simulate an in-person language classroom rather than trading scholarly energy for the vast online anonymity of a MOOC. A desire to enhance student learning — rather than anxieties about higher-education’s future or what peer institutions are doing — should be the driving force behind the incorporation of technology into the classroom. The leaders of this program seem to be marshaling digital technology for the right reasons. In Creole we might say “byen fèt”; we’ll leave it at “well done.”
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