Spanish@UTA

Broadening Perspectives: Business Spanish Courses at UTA Go Online
by José Tamez, adjunct professor of Spanish

The Spanish Section’s Business Spanish courses are experiencing exceptional growth. International Business Spanish Students who select Spanish as their language of focus are required to take two Spanish courses: Span4334 Culture and Globalization in the Hispanic World and Span4335 Business Spanish. Due to increased enrollment and the need for flexibility in course scheduling, Dr. Chris Conway and I secured University support to work with the Center for Distance Education at UTA to develop these courses as online courses. We had a fruitful summer working with Matt Crosslin, one of the only designers at the Center for Distance Education who is comfortable working with the Moodle Course Management System. Unlike WebCT, Moodle is a free Learning Management System for hosting online courses.

In the Fall, we launched the online version of Span4335 Business Spanish. In this course, students learn business terminology in Spanish and study cultural phenomena that affect how business is carried out in Spanish-speaking countries. This course is vital for anyone who desires to improve communication by expanding their Spanish lexicon and, when space is available, is open to Spanish majors.

Even more exciting is that Span4334 Culture and Globalization of the Hispanic World will transition online in Spring 2008. The flavor of this culture class is quite different because it touches on broader topics like history, politics and the economy. It makes students more sensitive in dealing with Hispanic businesswomen and men. A few components of this creative, online odyssey are: transcript interviews with business professionals, audio and video lectures, and group projects that connect students to the international business community.

Moreover, Americas 21, the Business Spanish Online News Magazine, was conceived in the Fall of 2007 as an integral part of Span4334 Culture and Economic Globalization in the Hispanic World. It is a resource that allows the global community to read about current events affecting the Spanish-speaking world through articles and news summaries written by UTA students enrolled in Span4334. Through Americas 21, students become informed, work together, and contribute to educating the general public.

Dr. Conway and I have been driven to make the Business Spanish courses exciting, rigorous and inspiring. While there may be some growing pains as we launch these new, online courses, preliminary feedback has been positive, and all teaching is always a work-in-progress. In closing, I’d like to say that we are also excited about creating more opportunities for non-International Business Spanish Majors to take SP4334 Culture and Globalization in the Hispanic World. Dr. Conway will be teaching an extra section of the course in the Spring semester to cover student demand among non-IBSP majors. Students are reminded, however, that internet classes, and in particular these internet classes, are very challenging. Our courses require a high level of command of Spanish.

Some webpages are forever, thanks to “The Wayback Machine“, a project that is trying to archive billions of webpages for posterity. Recently, I decided to go down memory lane and find out if our old Spanish section websites had been captured by the project. I was happy to see our earliest faculty pages up, including this 1999 page with photos and bios of the Spanish faculty. As you can see, the list of professors is quite different than the one we have today. Dating back to 1998, we find Dr. Matthew Wyszynski’s SPAN4334 Culture of Business Website and an article that we reprinted from The Shorthorn about a visit to the campus by a talented Cuban poet, Raúl Mesa.

The earliest captures of the Department of Modern Languages (then called “Foreign” Languages) date to 1996. The Language Acquisition Center was in charge of the Department webpages at first but then, starting in 1999, individual faculty members began developing section webpages. I am proud to say that I was the first Spanish webmaster back in those days, and later Dr. Pablo Pastrana took over that responsibility. In terms of Spanish course webpages designed by UTA faculty, the first ones to appear in 1997 were my SPAN 3312 Latin American Culture page, and two courses prepared by Dr. Matthew Wyszynski: SPAN3318 Selected Readings and SPAN 4334 Culture of business.