In January, OU's Board of Trustees passed a resolution to adopt a plan for monitoring and evaluating academic courses and programs.
However, a majority of those classes continue to be offered this semester at OU's main campus, though the university is still monitoring them because of their small class sizes, Steve Howard, director of the Center for International Studies, said.
“I’m shaking my head in enormous frustration because low enrollment, I think, is kind of a distraction I think from the bigger issue, which is the pedagogy of teaching unfamiliar foreign languages such as Thai,” Howard said.
In 2015, the Ohio Revised Code enacted a law requiring each state institution of higher education to provide its trustees with a report of all courses and programs based on enrollment and student performance.
The evaluation needs to be conducted every five years, and it was completed at OU in January.
The list included 507 classes at OU, half of which were from the Athens campus.
OU is looking into a handful of options for those classes:
- Designing the course to be shared with other institutions
- Moving to online or hybrid courses in order to increase enrollment
- Removing the course from the curriculum or phasing it out
- Combining class sections or scheduling the class less frequently
- •Declining to take any action
Because of the trustees' plan, the number of less commonly taught languages at Ohio University could be on the decline. Language classes that are less commonly taught make up about a fifth of the classes under review.
“The best way to teach these classes is in a low enrollment class,” Howard said.
Despite fulfilling his foreign language requirement his freshman year of college, Alexander Trouten is learning to speak Thai at OU.
“I know Thailand’s not as developed and I’d like to … go on missions to less-privileged countries,” Trouten, a junior studying pre-medicine, said. “If I could do missions over there it would be very beneficial that I could speak the language.”
He is one of four students in Pittaya Paladroi’s intermediate Thai class this semester, which is twice as many students as the class had Spring Semester, she said.
“If we try to cut all these world languages, how can American students learn what the other people think or perceive?” Paladroi said.
Trouten said he doesn’t mind the small class size because he likes the closer-knit environment and more individualized experience.
“You get to know each other more personally and the interaction is more real, especially for a language class,” Trouten said.
