Mutual benefits

A recent partnership between Duke and the University of Virginia seeks to combine the two institutions’ resources to promote the teaching of Creole and Tibetan languages. This effort to expand opportunities for students to study these “low-visibility languages” will tangibly benefit both the students enrolled in these courses and the academic communities at both schools. The partnership represents a creative and intelligent use of institutional resources—potentially serving as a model for balancing the university’s financial constraints with its pedagogical aspirations in a time of increased budget-consciousness.

In an era where the transformative impact of technology on higher education is constantly touted, the Duke-UVA partnership does something refreshing: It utilizes existing technologies to enhance, rather than replace, traditional modes of instruction. Students enrolled in these courses will still gather in classrooms to be instructed, still have individual access to professors in office hours and still have close academic interactions with fellow students—all facilitated via videoconferencing technology. Many of the fears associated with massively open online courses—that instruction quality will suffer, that students will cheat on exams or that students will lose something essential in being removed from campus—are alleviated. This is a college course designed to be delivered via a different medium, not a pre-packaged module lacking structure.

Furthermore, “low-visibility languages” like Tibetan and Creole, given the typically low demand for instruction and the lack of qualified experts, might otherwise go untaught. These programs are not necessarily sustainable on a large scale, but absolutely important. The benefits for students are obvious, in the form of acquired language skills, but the benefits for the University—in the form of expanded opportunities inside and outside the classroom—are multifaceted. A cadre of students and faculty intensely interested in a language could provide the foundation for further research opportunities, service projects and scholarly exchanges. The initiative helps the University further its societal mission through working to preserve and transmit languages and research into the cultures sustaining them. At the same time, as a cost-neutral initiative, it eliminates the financial and logistical barriers to establishing a new language program by taking advantage of existing resources at two reputable institutions.

As a potential drawback, this initiative could lead the University to begin “farming out” programs rather than developing them internally. We have some concern that this will set a precedent that deciding whether or not classes should be taught on campus will be made solely in terms of student demand and cost, as opposed to a fuller consideration of academic importance. While we believe this initiative is unique in that it facilitates the teaching of courses that would otherwise not exist on campus, we hope that the University will continue to assess programs holistically. Cost is an important component in managing a campus, but not the only one.

Moving forward, we hope the University continues to seek out opportunities to supplement and enhance its own academic offerings through these types of institutional partnerships. When done right, these types of programs allow the University to sustain innovative work in unique disciplines.