So, the last two months have pretty much been about software. Not software in the personal computer/Macintosh sense of the word, even though earlier this year I had to get a new laptop – my old Vaio is dead, long live my old Vaio! – but software in the use it for work sense. Yes, as academics we all have our specific suite of software that we like to curse. Science types, for instance, have cursed Mathematica and anything put out by ESRI for a long time.  As a humanist, I am faced with the challenge of finding software that I can use, that is accessible to my students, and that will not cause undue economic stress to them or to myself.

Finding software that does not cause undue economic stress can prove challenging. As an instructor at a major research university, my students and I get access to Blackboard. Blackboard allows instructors to post exercises, provides students with a platform to hand in assignments with an electronic time stamp, and streamlines communication between faculty and students – for better or for worse. It proves better, because I can communicate with my students without having to keep track of their contact information personally. Our enrollment software interfaces with Blackboard and updates contact information automatically. It proves worse, because I am from an older generation. I typed all my papers my Freshman year in college. I remember when computers came into common use. Students today have been raised with the assumption that you will be accessible via electronic media twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That just is not a possibility in my world.

This summer, I have focused on upgrading my electronic tool skills because I will be having a mixed level Russian class next semester – my students returning from Russia will be mixed in with my second year Russian students. Clearly, there will be a gaping chasm in the level of verbal, grammatical, and written skills. I need these tools to be able to create enough high quality work to rotate students – higher level work for higher level students, and enough common level work for them to learn from each other. Believe it or not, this is a daunting task. My students, particularly my advanced students, need that much attention this year.

I have focused on two workshops – Blackboard certification for distance learning courses at my home institution, and a Startalk teacher workshop focusing on electronic resources. What I have learned from both these courses is that very little high quality language learning educational software exists, particularly for Slavic languages, that does not include a substantial amount of economic investment. Blackboard becomes cost effective only when purchased for a large volume of users. Outside of that, for Russian in specific, there is Russnet, sponsored by American Councils for International Education/American Council of Teachers of Russian.  It provides tools for basic exercises, such as multiple choice questions, essay writing, and matching.  It allows for the automation of general rote and mechanical language learning tasks, like drilling case and verb endings, as well as to develop reading and writing skills.

What is sorely lacking, unfortunately, is a truly robust language learning software platform that can allow not only academics, but serious students of language, to develop their own exercises at all levels – a suite that allows you, for instance, to split your screen in two parts, with an article, for instance, appearing on the left side, while the mechanical exercises appear on the right, so students can still have an easy visual reference to the original language in context. Also, it still is really difficult to create exercises that integrate video or audio files to other text based exercises.

The problem with such a program is the basic realm of economics. Language and literature departments find themselves as the first to face budget cuts, especially in this economy. They need to argue better than other departments for any resources that they have. Unfortunately, more and more, the resources do not go much further than to protect their face to face teaching contact hours. This is particularly vital with the Less Commonly Taught Languages, where grammatical and linguistic structures do not map word to word with the English structures. This means departments cannot afford to spend thousands of dollars on foreign language specific software. This leaves instructors with access to something like Blackboard, which cuts across the board to almost all academic disciplines, but forces instructors to spend increasing amounts of time in front to their keyboard developing content, rather than working on their classroom face to face contact content or, heaven forbid!, on their actual academic research.

The most economically sensible, but administratively challenging, solution, would be for a consortium of world languages and cultures departments within a region to come together and develop such a suite, most likely using open source platforms.  The departments would have to be willing to invest in one or two extremely high caliber developers. Hiring and keeping one or two such developers would be more palatable is distributed among several institutions. A realistic development and testing schedule would lead to a level of software that does not exist anywhere in the market right now. Such a suite, designed with Less Commonly Taught Languages in mind, would prove invaluable to language instructors who face the same pressures in other institutions to teach more with less funds. Anything that can increase faculty productivity in these fields needs to be designed with the needs of this field in mind.