Distance Instruction

[Prof. Walter Comins-Richmond]

I saw a demonstration of distance instruction at an AATSEEL meeting at
UCLA last year. The students uniformly responded negatively to it. The
people giving the demonstration assured us this was not meant to be used
to eliminate jobs, but at UC Davis this is precisely the case.

>>From a more general standpoint, by
supplying distance learning, a student is discouraged from attending a
college like mine, that does offer Russian. We have one student right now
who chose our school because it was one of only two in the country that
offered Russian and another subject the student wanted to combine into a
major. If Russian was offered everywhere via distance learning, we would
not have had the leverage we had.

It should be obvious to anyone who has taught a language that distance
learning is woefully inferior to real contact. It should be equally
obvious to anyone who has paid attention to the corporate model being
applied to universities recently that distance learning is a form of
downsizing. As a Southern Californian I am aware of the fight you are
facing. I am not sure the rest of the country is aware of the all out
assault upon Russian and foreign languages in general taking place in the
UC system, but I oppose it.

**********************************
Walter Comins-Richmond
Assistant Professor
Department of Languages and Literatures
Occidental College
Los Angeles, CA 90041

On Sun, 17 May 1998, Fred Choate wrote:

> Dear Seelangers,
>
> We are faced with the possibility of "distance instruction" next year, i.e.,
> teaching second-year Russian to a group of students at another campus via a
> live, two-way television hookup.  Do any of you have experience teaching
> Russian in this manner? Any feelings, pro or contra?
>
> Fred Choate
> Lecturer, UC Davis
>