By Carmen Granda, Amherst College The pandemic has created many challenges in and outside of our classrooms. Although much professional development for instructors in the last months has been focused on how to design engaging virtual classes for our students
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By Laura Marshall, Assistant Director, Russian Flagship Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison Despite the many challenges that 2020 has presented, there are some silver linings for language learners and educators. This may seem counterintuitive to anyone who has pondered see-through masks
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By Sandhya Shanker, Director, Community Language School, Michigan State University, and Elizabeth Ablan, Graduate Assistant, Community Language School, Michigan State University Whirlwind. Curveball. Whiplash. Unexpected. Unprecedented. These were just a few of the words swirling around as we transitioned
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By Jonathan Risner, Associate Professor, Indiana University Bloomington For some six years, I have regularly taught a 300-level film analysis course in Spanish at Indiana University Bloomington. I structure the course in a way that the first half of the
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By Kevin Anzzolin, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Stout For most if not all educators in the United States, spring semester 2020 can be largely defined by a single but weighty word: “pivot.” By mid-March, the COVID-19 pandemic had forced us
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By Svitlana Malykhina and Nadiya Prokopyeva, Boston University Introduction BU Russian Poetry is a comprehensive multimedia Open Educational Resource (OER) where students read poetry and experiment in a laboratory for new forms of analysis while developing their
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By Erin Frazier, Euan Bonner, Ryan Lege, Kanda University of International Studies Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous and intertwined with everyday life, especially with the proliferation of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google
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By José Vergara, Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, Swarthmore College Introduction When my students and I first began studying Chernobyl in late January, we had little idea that the entire globe would soon be swept up by a similar “invisible
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By Magara Maeda, University of Wisconsin River Falls and Lauren Rosen, University of Wisconsin Collaborative Language Program One of the most common questions we hear from instructors who are first moving to an online teaching environment is, “How
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By Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Professor of German, University of North Texas Introduction The shift to emergency remote instruction halfway through the spring 2020 semester forced all of us to pivot our instructional approaches without a lot of training. In order
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By Florencia Henshaw, Ph.D., Director of Advanced Spanish, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Nothing sparks more debate among language educators than the mere mention of Google Translate, other than perhaps the role of explicit grammar instruction. We might not be on
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By Christian T. Hilchey, University of Texas It already seems like an eternity ago that academic institutions were confronted with the reality of COVID-19 and the transition to remote instruction. Many of us rightly felt overwhelmed by the new teaching
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By Becky Cottrell, Ph.D Senior Lecturer of Spanish, Metropolitan State University of Denver Have you ever wanted to take your class on a field trip to the Prado museum in Spain, or the Louvre in Paris? How about going on
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By Caitlin Cornell, Assistant Director, the Center for Language Teaching Advancement & Ph.D. student in Second Language Studies at Michigan State University In response to the uncertainty resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, many institutions of higher education are contemplating going
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