Raising enrollment: a new chance!

[Yelaina Khripkov]

Dear SEELANGers,

As far as I received a lot of enthusiastic replies for my recent message, I
would like to repeat my invitation for those who, for some reason, have
missed it.

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I have been attentively following the recent discussion about the dramatic
fall of enrollment in Russian programs, but was keeping silent, "do pory,
do vremeni," about the attempts of my department (Univ. of Oregon) to
improve the situation in our program. I wanted to make sure that our
measures work. It turned out they do. I want to share our success and hopes
with everybody. If it worked for us, it may work for someone else!

Last summer I received a grant for preparing a new experimental
interdisciplinary course "Doing Business with Russia." The practical goal
was to attract non-Russian majors to the Russian program. I intensively
advertised the course in our School of Business. We had twenty students
enrolled.  I taught the course during this Fall term and it was a
tremendous success. The results were as follows: 17 out of 20 demanded
course continuation in Winter term; 2 students decided to take First year
Russian; the School of Business got extremely interested and proposed to
help with the marketing of the course, promising to attract 150 students if
we offer a three term sequence and have the courses satisfy some general
University requirements (multi-cultural, Arts and Letters, etc.). The
Office of International Affairs is working now at a new grant for course
preparation.

After working at and teaching this course, I came to some conclusions:
1. We need to offer new courses oriented towards concrete professions in
other fields: students should know exactly why they are studying Russian
and how they are going to apply it. Business is the most perspective among
such professions: no matter what happens in Russia, international business
will develop there;
2. Russia is fascinating for people who do not know anything about it, and
most of the students are like this;
3. Such course should have three main components: professional (business),
cultural, and language; such structure provides a better hook. Language
alone (as Business Russian, for example) does not work;
4. Students majoring in business are aggressive, adventurous, curious, and
are eager to take risks (like going to Russia and trying their luck there);
5. The general university requirements must be satisfied anyway and the
students would rather take courses connected to their field;
6. There are no other language programs that offer such a course;
7. Schools of Business have money and a lot of students: so make them your
partners.

To those who got hooked: I am making a presentation about all this at
AATSEEL in Washington, DC - Panel: Russian for Business, Dec. 30, 1:00-3:00
p.m. I will tell in detail about how to advertise such a course, how to
structure it, how to keep interest high, how to promote the language
component, how to take the business part off the instructor's shoulders and
put it on those of the students, and also about textbooks, materials and
sources, etc.

Come to the panel, dear colleagues, and join the discussion!





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Yelaina Kripkov                                 tel: (541) 346-4077 work
Dept. of Russian                                     (541) 345-9122 home
University of Oregon                            fax: (541) 346-1327
Eugene, OR 97403                                ykripkov at oregon.uoregon.edu