College's for-profit ventures expand

On Nov. 20 Middlebury Interactive Languages (MIL) officially launched its software program MiddWorld Online at the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) conference in Boston, Mass.

The demonstration was “very well attended,” according to Michael Geisler, vice president of language schools, schools abroad and graduate programs at the College and chief learning officer at MIL.

In addition to the presentation at the conference, MIL also showcased the product at a reception for alumni and friends of the College.

“The interest has been great,” added Geisler.

Director of Spanish Curricular Development for MIL and Assistant Professor of Spanish Ana Martínez-Lage will also give a talk entitled “A New Approach to Online Language Teaching: New Technologies and Current Second Language Acquisition Principles” today, Dec. 2, at 4:30 p.m. in the Robert A. Jones ’59 House Conference Room. Martínez-Lage has worked with a team of authors to develop the Spanish curriculum for the MiddWorld Online Program.  The French curricular team is headed by Director of French School Aline Germain-Rutherford.
Martínez-Lage’s lecture will focus on the pedagogical principles used in the curriculum and format of the MiddWorld Online program. Martínez-Lage will explain these principles and show samples of their application in the Spanish I MIL course.

A beta version of the software has been released and is currently being tested in a number of schools “mostly in the New York City Area,” said Geisler.  The results of these tests will be reported by mid-December.  After analyzing these results, MIL hopes to officially launch the product in January of 2011.

“We’ve had so many requests from seventh through 12th grade schools around the country wanting to be beta site testers for this program, which is encouraging, but it also reflects the dire state of language teaching in those areas. It’s an interesting sort of opportunity,” said President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz.

MIL represents a collaboration between the College’s own faculty and Virginia-based online learning company K12, Inc. The company represents a for-profit venture by the College as outlined in the strategic financial plan that Liebowitz announced in February.

“Finances were not a missing piece of this,” commented Liebowitz. “This came up before the recession, but the idea that this venture could support the College financially means that there’s less pressure on comprehensive fee increases and that there could be less pressure on the endowment earnings we have been working from. There’s a positive for the College as well, potentially.”

MIL will release MiddWorld Online, an online language learning software program, in both Spanish and French.

“We are really developing the product to serve three different populations: one, the individual learner, who doesn’t have access to language teaching … second, a hybrid situation where you have schools that don’t have enough money to hire teachers for foreign languages … third, for direct, face-to-face high school classes… [the product] can actually be used like a very interactive electronic online textbook,” said Geisler.

For the schools that lack funding to hire full-time teachers, Geisler stressed that the software is not a replacement for language instructors.

“For those kind of situations we can then provide the program with the additional interactive, collaborative part, plus a teacher who meets with the students once a week.” said Geisler.

Martínez Lage explained that the weekly “sessions with a remote teacher are not instructional sessions per se that introduce new material … those sessions are review and feedback sessions.”

“Many [of the] activities that are teacher-graded — both oral activities and written activities — are sent back to the student with feedback.  The student then has an opportunity to go back and correct, resubmit, etcetera and then in the weekly sessions ask questions,” added Martínez-Lage.

Martínez-Lage explained that these weekly sessions would mostly be held via videoconference, where students would be able to communicate with the teachers from remote locations.
In addition to software for students, MIL also offers its Professional Development Program in which teachers will be trained to utilize the software.

“We’ll have to hire teachers and train teachers how to work with our product, because it’s a lot more collaborative and interactive than anything else that’s out there,” said Geisler.

Teachers planning to use MiddWorld Online will be trained in seminars, either in concentrated markets such as New York or Boston or at the Language Schools in Monterey or Middlebury.
In terms of the overall structure of the program, Martínez-Lage explained how the different components involve interaction among students and teachers.

“The learning environment that we have developed has three components: first, what we refer to as the ‘core course,’ with 14 units and 10 lessons per unit, based on authentic materials taken mostly from video shot in 8 different locations… second, an online community, and then a 3-D game," said Martínez-Lage.

According to Martínez-Lage, this online community, titled Language Park, “will allow for real-time oral and written interaction but also for lots of asynchronous interaction, as students will post their work, comments and ideas in a wiki, a forum, etcetera.”

“The idea is that students belong to a community of learners where the content they’re learning is shared with others," added Martínez-Lage.

MIL teamed up with Newburyport, Mass.-based company Muzzy Lane to design and build the 3-D software.  The MiddWorld Online product is modeled after the Muzzy Lane “American Dynasties” program, which utilizes user input in order to generate the interactions among the 3-D figures, which are voiced by native speakers.

“We want to have interesting games for students to play,” said Geisler. “We want them to learn, but we also push very hard with the developing team that these need to be engaging and fun because you want students to go there not just because they have to but also because they want to.”

The program’s curriculum also emphasizes learning strategies for language acquisition.

“We are training students to be successful learners … that are aware of their own learning processes so that they can use strategies to deal with unknown material,” said Martínez-Lage.

Martínez-Lage explained that the program teaches students “to deal with being exposed to a clip of authentic language and not feel intimidated or scared because they don’t understand everything. There’s constant training of the students in the use of metacognitive strategies.”

For example, when watching a video clip, students are trained to develop hypotheses regarding the context of the situation in order to process the type of vocabulary that might be utilized.

As a company, MIL continues to expand its national presence. MIL has offices in Middlebury, located in the Marble Works, in order to maintain a connection with the language schools. Offices in Provo, Utah conduct development for the online program while administrative offices in Chicago, Ill. handle marketing, recruitment and sales.

Geisler explained that MIL hopes to expand its products in the future.

“We’re bringing out Spanish and French first, but we fully intend to go beyond that. We’re looking at Chinese right now and a little bit down the road I hope that we will be looking at German, Italian and Japanese and then we’ll take it from there,” said Geisler.

Earlier this month, the College also announced an additional site for the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy (MMLA) 2011 summer programs.  MMLA, another for-profit venture by the College, hosts high schools students on university campuses for language-intensive summer programs.  The College has now added Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I. as an additional site, in addition to existing campuses in Vermont, Pennsylvania, Illinois, South Carolina and California.  This will be the program’s fourth year in existence.