Bilingual Teaching Courses Offered Online

Students Don't Meet in Class

After the kids are in bed, Juan can sit at his home computer and instantly he becomes a student in a College of Santa Fe linguistics class.

He can live in Chama, or Springer or even Idaho, and never worry about setting foot in Santa Fe.

Over one academic year and a summer, Juan can complete six online classes. Then, he will be certified to work as a bilingual or English-as-a-second-language teacher.

School districts will never know the difference when they hire him, because the College of Santa Fe transcripts make no distinction between virtual classes and their face-to-face counterparts.

Wallace Pond, assistant chairman of the college’s Education Department, said he was skeptical when he began the pilot program in the spring with 30 students, who attended tuition-free in exchange for their critiques of the online courses.

“I went into it with a negative bias,” he said. “This is all new to me. I built the program from the ground up, learning along the way.”

To prepare, Pond enrolled in online classes himself and sought out extensive training.

The convenient way for students to finish the 24-credit-hour certification program may help solve what the U.S. Department of Education recently declared as a “severe teacher shortage” in New Mexico in bilingual education and teaching English as a second language.

New Mexico has the largest percentage of students with limited English proficiency of any state in the nation. In the 1998-99 school year, there were 1,102 teachers approved to teach students with limited English skills, but 409 of them were on waivers, meaning they hadn’t met the criteria for endorsement.

Teachers with bachelor’s degrees can take all the core bilingual classes online, but the prerequisite six hours of foreign-language credit must be done in a regular classroom.

For Pond’s introductory linguistics class, students read textbooks, took online quizzes, completed online activities with a peer and illustrated the human brain on paper, which they sent through the U.S. Postal Service. Nothing would prevent students from cheating on tests, Pond said, so he made the scores only one-fifth of the grade.

He made his paper handouts into computer files and noted links on the Internet where students could read articles.

“I have no doubt that students online learned as much or more as they would in a regular class,” Pond said.

Some of them he had taught before in conventional classes; as online students, the shy ones “opened up and were much more confident.”

Online classes also prevent students from sitting at the back of the room and avoiding participation.

“Online, every single student has to respond,” Pond said.

Some participants said the interactive, online classroom provided a deeper level of interaction between the professor and students as well as students with other students.

“Teachers in the trial program said they really enjoyed being able to participate when their schedule permitted,” Pond said. But he says online education isn’t for everybody. “Some people really need that face-to-face connection and structure” of regular classes.

“I would not want to teach all my classes this way. I would go insane,” Pond admits. “In this day and age when everyone is so busy, it’s a great addition to educational options.”

Tuition for the program is $261 per credit hour.

How to enroll

To sign up for a class, go to www.csf.edu and click on “online TESL/bilingual education program”



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