French on the Blackboard ... No More Chalk on the Fingers: French Courses on a High-Tech Blackboard

Abstract

In July 1999, along with twelve colleagues from the University of New Hampshire (five in the College of Liberal Arts), I was invited to participate in the UNH Blackboard Project, a program that is part of a larger initiative sponsored by a partnership between the UNH Library and UNH Computing and Information Services. The goal of this partnership is to provide technical support to faculty who want to explore Internet technologies and incorporate them into their courses. More specifically, the goal of the UNH Blackboard Project in its initial phase was to prepare a number of Web sites to support courses for the Fall semester of the Academic Year (AY} 1999-2000, usingcourse-managementsoftwarecalled Blackboard (formerly Courselnfo ), produced and marketed by Blackboard lnc.1 Online education has revolutionized the teaching methods of a good number of educators who use Internet technologies to communicate and collaborate with their students in an educational context. With a program like Blackboard, traditional methods of teaching and learning are supplemented with Webbased components and virtual forms of communication.