Making both ends meet: Reaching out to Tacoma students via teleconferencing
In Fall 2012, for the first time, the Department of Germanics offered a beginning language class via teleconferencing to provide students on the Tacoma campus the opportunity to participate in our language program. Verena Kick, a graduate teaching assistant in the department, connected three times a week with a group of seven students who were located at a remote classroom on the Tacoma campus. Two classrooms at the Tacoma and UW campuses were equipped with high tech polycam systems that made it possible to project the instructor, the students, and textual and multimedia content onto multiple screens, which ultimately allowed for a highly interactive and input rich language learning experience. Thanks to Prof. Klaus Brandl, who designed the curriculum and spearheaded the project, Verena Kick (Ph.C), who taught this class with great enthusiasm and contributed many ideas, and the Language Learning Center, which provided the technical support, this experiment has been a great success and promises to serve as a model for other language departments in the future.
Prof. Brandl is currently planning to expand this model by including other branch campuses as well.