Developing and sharing language materials in a consortium context
DESCRIPTION: The UC Consortium for Language Learning & Teaching (http://uccllt.ucdavis.edu) constitutes an example of an open digital community for language faculty and students at the ten UC campuses. The Consortium distributes small awards ($20,000) that enable UC language faculty to develop web-based learning materials with the proviso that all materials must be freely shared with the other UC campuses and those of the other California university systems (Cal State and Community Colleges). The Consortium has also successfully competed for two large federal (title vi) grants to support the development of Arabic (FIPSE, co-PI at BYU) and Punjabi (IRS) web materials. Again, the fruits of these projects are freely available for use in the system and beyond. In addition, the Consortium is planning to publish the results from its second language research conferences and colloquia through /e-Scholarship Repository /(http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/), an open-source initiative of the California Digital Library. These are examples of how a group of autonomous universities can embrace the philosophy of open digital communities by using a common infrastructure to great advantage for the local level.
