UNE > News and Events > Browse by article > UNE language courses find another home in north Queensland

Next UNE-based invention makes light work of goal shifting November 13, 2006  

Previous UNE hosts Taiwanese academics November 10, 2006 

UNE language courses find another home in north Queensland

November 10, 2006

An innovative program based at The University of New England (UNE) is making it possible for university students in north Queensland to study a range of modern languages through a blend of online and on-campus tuition.

From next year, students at James Cook University (JCU) will be able to study a number of languages through courses provided by UNE: German has been available this year, and Chinese and Italian will begin in 2007. UNE is providing all the tuition in these three languages at JCU. (UNE will also be assisting in the teaching of French at JCU by providing a first-year course from 2007, while a JCU staff member looks after the other French courses.)

The Head of UNE’s School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Associate Professor Herman Beyersdorf (pictured here), together with UNE lecturers Isabel Tasker (Chinese) and Anna Cavallaro (Italian), visited JCU’s Cairns campus last month to make final arrangements for the introduction of Chinese and Italian next year. They discussed the program with Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Janet Greeley and other JCU staff members.

The “UNE Blended Model” combines distance education – much of it online – with face-to-face tuition. While in Cairns, the UNE lecturers conducted interviews that resulted in the selection of local tutors. “The Chinese and Italian communities are long-standing components of north Queensland society,” Dr Beyersdorf said. “Representatives of these communities were involved in our discussions with JCU about the new language courses.”

“Languages are vulnerable at many universities in the current tertiary-education climate,” he continued. “Our ‘Blended Model’ offers other institutions a cost-effective alternative to setting up their own language-teaching programs. UNE even hires and pays the local tutors.”

He explained that, while students at the collaborating university studied the same program (with the same lecturers, course materials and exams) as UNE students, their courses were credited as being from their home university.

This collaborative program began in 2005 with the delivery of UNE German courses to students at the University of Newcastle. The program extended to Queensland this year, with students at JCU’s Townsville campus studying UNE German courses. Earlier this year UNE won a Commonwealth Government grant of $195,000 to enable a team led by Associate Professor Kerry Dunne to develop innovative new teaching materials for the program.

Dr Beyersdorf pointed out that while the program would inevitably grow “vertically”, with the succession of second-year and third-year courses, he expected it to grow “horizontally” as well – i.e., to extend to other universities. Talks were already under way with a number of Australian universities as well as a university in New Zealand, he said. “UNE has the necessary infrastructure – including that for online teaching – and decades of experience,” he added.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at November 10, 2006 04:50 PM