Grant program: Teaching and Learning Development Grant (TLDG)

Grant recipient: Catherine Black, Department of French

Project team: Alida Soucé (Soucé is a visiting MA student from Strasbourg University, France) and Greg Hum, research assistants

Timeframe: February to May 2013

Funding: $5,000

Course addressed: Developing a possible French for Business distance education course

Description:  The Department of French is branching out to the community at large to answer SFU tag: Engaging the World. Presently there is no French for Business course offered at SFU. Offering such a course could be of interest to the Business School students, to the Vancouver Business Community, and potentially to world communities such as India, China and Brazil, all SFU partners in education. Offering the course on-line with an in-house developed e-book would benefit students, the department and indirectly SFU. Currently, all French distance education (DE) courses are offered to SFU students only. I am working with the Centre for Online and Distance Education (CODE) to offer DE courses opened to non-SFU students. The e-book and the web-based course are a perfect medium for such an endeavour with CODE. Furthermore, there is not a similar product (e-book for Business French) on the market at present.  Once the web-based course and the e-books are completed I will conduct a study to determine if the web-based course with various visual media, sensory-rich, and virtual experiential activities enhances student learning and is more appealing than the e-book.  This year a visiting MA student in a Language Education Engineering degree that focuses on new technologies and media for education purposes is part of the project team (Strasbourg University, France).

Questions addressed:

• Which of the web-based courses or the e-book for Business French engages more  students?
• Are both media valid ways to teach Business French?
  

Knowledge sharing: Our department’s brown bag mini colloquia will be the perfect venue for our project.