The ESL and Foreign Languages Department at Kendall
Campus is in the second year of a 3-year, $500,000 Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) grant
called eWriting. The project is an ambitious e-learning undertaking
whose original goal was to produce 250 hours of English as a Second Language
(ESL) writing lab curriculum in self-contained language Learning Objects (LOs)
and to create a student support system to help ESL students succeed in their
online learning endeavors. The original idea of the grant was to have the
Kendall Campus ESL faculty author this six-level interactive online writing lab
program, each with 45 hours of online instruction, and then to contract
programmers to put these lessons online for all campuses and create the student
support modules....
Well, at least that was the original goal of the e-Writing
program. Things have changed over the
past year, and the project has expanded considerably and taken surprising and
exciting new directions.
The participation in content authoring has expanded to
include faculty members at four campuses.
Irasema Fernández and Steven Donahue (North) are
developing level 1 modules with Nancy Monterrubio (Kendall). Nancy was also the co-author of level 3.
Maria Fallon (another veteran, level 3) and Reina Welch are as busy on level
2. In addition to the excellent quality of their work and remarkable
punctuality in submitting it, they are providing content-relevant animations
and invaluable error analysis.
Together, Margaret Shippey (Wolfson) and Jane Stanley-McGrath
(InterAmerican) make an outstanding level 4 team and are continuing Marcia
Cassidy (Kendall) and Jan Pérez’s (Kendall)
work. They share a similar professional background and enthusiasm for ESL
content development. The latter is evident in their initial LOs –
marvelous contributions to level 4. Helen Roland (Kendall) and Frank Quebbeman (Wolfson) are the new
awesome level 6 team. Helen, in tandem with Paula Sánchez (Kendall), completed
level 5 LOs. Always the perfectionist, Helen is adding the final touches to
level 5 and, with Marta Bret (Kendall)
and Frank Quebbeman (Wolfson), is devoting her talent as a writer to
developing the advanced level of the eWriting lab.
The student support module project has expanded to
involve five other colleges and universities in the US and Puerto Rico.
In addition to creating 250 hours of online Writing
Lab curriculum, the eWriting grant’s secondary goal is to develop a
support environment for online ESL students. This aspect of the project has
recently blossomed into a more comprehensive and larger-scale undertaking.
Judith Garcia and Rhonda Berger drafted a HETS* grant proposal on behalf of
five other Colleges and Universities in the US and Puerto Rico. A few weeks ago MDC was notified of the
$25,000 joint award, so now the ESL department will be working with Hostos
Community College of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York
City, the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, the University of Texas at
Brownsville, and La Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico on this
project. The grant funds will be used to develop the standards, guidelines and
models for the production of learning objects and to seed a repository with
Learning Objects (LOs) intended to help ESL students (especially Hispanic
students) succeed in online courses. The guidelines this team develops will be
used by the MDC FIPSE staff to build its repository of Online
Learning Support modules intended to help ESL students succeed in online
courses.
The project has expanded
to include publishers and to become a possible long-term source of revenue to
the Department/College:
Though it was not the
original intent to produce anything other than an online Writing Lab program/support
system for MDC students, when the grant directors saw the excellent quality of
the lessons that the faculty authors were producing, they presented some of the
materials to ESL publishers. As a
result, there are three publishing houses (International Thomson, McGraw Hill
and Houghton Mifflin) eager to publish the book versions and e-packs of the
online eWriting lab. The ball is in the college lawyers’ court now. If
the proposal is approved, the results will be twofold - national recognition of
the talented writers and royalties coming into the ESL program. The project
administrators are asking about the possibilities of using the
royalties to fund future ESL-related projects such as the development
of online support for other skills areas, endowed teaching chairs for ESL
faculty at the college, and even ESL student scholarships at all campuses.
If
all goes as anticipated, this project has the potential to bring proceeds into
the college for years to come. It will
also help not only the 12,000+ ESL students at MDC learn English, but will be
available to ESL students world-wide.
*FIPSE: the
Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education
*HETS: Hispanic Educational Telecommunications
System http://www.hets.org