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University Open courseware

 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes Post Reply
Jeito
Triglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 5823 days ago

55 posts - 63 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, French
Studies: Mandarin, German, Italian, Portuguese

 
 Message 1 of 3
27 December 2008 at 7:53pm | IP Logged 
Not long ago, I discovered that some major universities in the U.S. are putting many of their courses online to be downloaded and used for free. That includes language courses! Free! Libre! Gratis! Kostenlos!

One of the ones to start this trend is MIT. They are putting almost all of their curriculum online. Their language courses are listed under the Arts & Humanities menu.They have Madarin, Japanese, German, and French courses. I would post the URL for MIT, but I am new here, and not sure if I am supposed to do that. Can someone tell me if that is accepted practice?

What I would like to know is, are universities in other countries doing anything similar?   


Jeito


Edited by Jeito on 27 December 2008 at 7:54pm

1 person has voted this message useful



unzum
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
soyouwanttolearnalan
Joined 6920 days ago

371 posts - 478 votes 
Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 2 of 3
28 December 2008 at 11:56am | IP Logged 
I'm in the middle of creating a courseware page for my website, so I've researched a bit which unis have free language courses.

The MIT page is here The Chinese one looks okay, as it includes a downloadable textbook plus, but the Japanese one requires you to have Eleanor Jordan's book, which isn't available to download, but you can download several 'readings' from the book. So not all of the courses are 'complete' language learning materials.

One that looked really good is Carnegie Mellon's French 101 & 102[/ur">. It uses videos and interactive exercises and seems like a really good alternative to people who can't attend uni.

Open university also has some great free courses for French, German, Spanish, Latin & Ancient Greek. The material seems pretty good, and the teaching method is fairly traditional, i.e. how you learned languages in school.

Utah State University has courseware for Chinese & Latin, however, the website doesn't appear to be working right now.

Then of course there's the Princeton Russian course, which was used at the university between 1998-2004 and is always praised highly.

I would be interested to hear from people who have mainly used courseware for learning a language.
1 person has voted this message useful



Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7162 days ago

4228 posts - 8259 votes 
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 3 of 3
28 December 2008 at 1:41pm | IP Logged 
Oscar Swan of the University of Pittsburgh has put up an online version of his Polish course for first-year students plus several other resources including his reference manual on Polish grammar. Half of the audio for the first-year course is available so far and he explained to me in an email that he was working on making the rest of the audio available.

http://polish.slavic.pitt.edu/

The University of Toronto has put up digital versions of the tapes from Assya Humesky's textbook "Modern Ukrainian" and "Ukrainian for Undergraduates" by Danylo Struk. Access to Humesky's textbook is protected by password but it seems to be unevenly applied (like some of the materials at Indiana University's language lab) and sometimes you can hear her Ukrainian audio without a password. The audio for Struk's textbook is in .wav format and is not protected by any password as far as I can tell. The university has not put either textbook on-line (not unexpected since they are under copyright).

http://lab.chass.utoronto.ca/slavic/Ukrainian/


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