Welcome to the Collaborative Language Program!
The UW System Collaborative Language Program (CLP) was established in January of 1998 to provide critical language instruction to university campuses otherwise unable to support these offerings. It is a grant-funded program to spread the wealth of language instruction to adult learners . CLP meets three primary objectives:
- Creating collaborative programs is of great interest to all UW institutions.
- Technology for distance learning is now pedagogically sound and functionally feasible to support collaborative language instruction.
- There is a clear need to focus on strategically important critical languages, primarily Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian.
While the initial focus of the program is on collaborative programming for the less commonly taught languages, the long-term goal is to look at collaborative efforts to provide support for the teaching of all languages.
Download our Brocure in a PDF document.
Instructional Model
Courses are taught in a traditional classroom setting that has been modified for interactive two-way videoconferencing (ITV). Through the use of this technology, UW Faculty work closely with students locally and on receiving campuses. Native speaking facilitators aid students at receive sites. In addition to attending class sessions, facilitators hold regular office hours. The use of facilitators helps ensure the success of our program on receiving campuses.
There are a variety of ITV technologies available, which vary greatly in quality, reliability and cost. For CLP courses, Internet Protocol (IP) video is used in a classroom setting. Our hybrid (blended) learning environment incorporates a variety of other Internet-based technologies as well. We use a web-based course management system to provide structure and tools such as Wimba Voice, Wikis, and webcams for further developing language proficiency.
Data since our program's inception maintain the following:
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CLP courses average over 60% retention from semester to semester, higher than the national average for these languages.
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Students at the receive site do as well or better than their peers at the origination site.
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Students in our distance courses are doing as well as students taking a comparable course in a non-distance class setting.
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CLP has grown from serving 98 students in 7 courses to serving over 300 students in 15 courses per semester.
Primary locations where CLP Languages are Spoken
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For further information or if you are interested in participating in our program, contact the program director, Lauren Rosen, lrosen@wisc.edu.
