SWISSLING

A Swiss network of Linguistics Courseware

Project Leader

Prof. Dr. Eddo Rigotti
eddo.rigotti@lu.unisi.ch
Istituto Linguisticio-Semiotico
Università della Svizzera italiana
Via Ospedale 13
6900 Lugano

Project Coordinator

Andrea Rocci
roccia@lu.unisi.ch
Istituto Linguisticio-Semiotico
Università della Svizzera italiana
Lugano

Project Partners

Summary

SWISSLING is a joint project with the major objective to develop an introductory course in linguistics targeted to university beginners in human sciences (linguistics; communication sciences; literature and languages). The concerned departments of five Universities in Switzerland (Lugano, Basle, Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich) have ensured their support to the project and declared their willingness to recognise SWISSLING into their curricula. Thus, already in the test phase, more than 700 students will be involved in the project and profit from a reduced classroom presence ranging about 75%.

In particular, the project's goals comprise the following issues: (1) Common use of distributed resources, improving the educational program of individual universities. (2) Better presentation of complex material by using multimedia strategies. Dynamic educational display of know-how and know-that training materials using multimedia tools. (3) Promoting co-operative learning. (4) Providing facilities for studying independently from both time and location; enabling self-paced individual and interactive learning and evaluation. (4) Co-ordination of the teaching of Linguistics in the three main language areas of Switzerland.

To cope with the wide diversity in course structure and size in the field of linguistics, the contents of the courseware will be organized in 12 modules, which will deal each with a fundamental topic of linguistics. In order to warrant the different curricula of the single universities, the modules of the course can be exploited either completely or selectively. This flexibility will allow also the integration of SWISSLING in other study curricula, specially that of Germanistik and Anglistik, thus greatly enlarging the potential audience.

The SWISSLING consortium comprises one partner with a broad experience in the field of new media and their use in learning (Institut Tecnologies de formation et apprentissage, Université de Genève), and one partner in charge of the pedagogical evaluation of the course (Faculté de Pédagogie et de Sciences de l'Education, Université de Genève). Finally, the Department of informatics of the Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera italiana will take care of the technical support for the project. A co-operation agreement has been also signed with a leading company in the field of translation of on-line materials (LOGOS), in order to provide multilingual support for the course.