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Princeton, Penn to share courses

Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania are collaborating on a program that will allow students at one institution to take foreign language courses from the other via video conferencing technology, Associate Dean of the College Hank Dobin said yesterday.

The program — slated to begin in September 2001 — will enable a professor to teach students concurrently in his classroom and at the other school by using remote-activated video cameras and microphones, Dobin said.

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Princeton faculty and administrators proposed video-conferenced classes in response to concern that undergraduates are unable to take foreign language courses that the University does not offer, Dobin added.

"We have at Princeton been concerned for a while to provide instruction in lesser-taught languages like Hindi and Swahili," he said.

The program will allow Princeton students to take Penn courses in Hindi and Swahili, and Penn students to take Near Eastern studies professor Erika Gilson's Turkish language classes. If the program is successful, more courses may be added, Dobin noted.

Princeton representatives picked Penn as a partner because of the school's proximity, excellent language resources and similar student needs, Dobin said.

"Penn has a fairly developed entity called the Penn Language Center. They do a great deal of hiring of native speakers," he said. "But maybe over time other schools can participate as well."

Before the joint program can begin, some logistical and academic issues must be settled. A compensation policy, for instance, has to be created in case more students from one school use the program than from the other, Dobin said.

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Penn Language Center academic director Harold Schiffman said he believed the program would be discontinued if one university benefitted from it disproportionately. "It will work only if we both have something to offer and something to get," he said. "It won't work if we have to 'sell' our resources."

Different calendars

Differences in the schools' academic calendars create an additional difficulty for the program's planners. For example, Penn's and Princeton's fall semesters overlap only by nine weeks. "The calendar is a really tough issue," Dobin said. "How do we get full instruction in only nine weeks?"

The University also would have to evaluate how grading practices and the Honor Code could apply to courses taught by Penn professors, Dobin said.

Princeton visiting religion professor Ephraim Isaac, who is teaching a one-time full-year seminar on Swahili initiated by students this year, said he was skeptical that video conferencing could successfully replace a traditional classroom setting for foreign language classes.

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"How can you teach language classes this way? They require interaction," he said. "I have very much doubt that students can learn this way."

Schiffman acknowledged that conducting classes by video conference may not be ideal. "Certainly it may not be the best way, but it is the only way," he said. "No one can afford to hire faculty for each language, but we can concentrate our resources."

The University's video conference facility will be housed in the Wallace Social Sciences Building — which is scheduled to open in the fall — according to Serge Goldstein, CIT academic services director.

"The facilities are optimized with special lighting, sound buffering and specialized equipment for 'echo buffering,' " Goldstein said.

However, the room in the Wallace building will not be the permanent home of classes that use video conferencing. The Friend Center for Engineering Education — scheduled to open in 2001 — will have a video conference room that can hold more than 35 students, Goldstein noted.