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Hi Cindy,

Our Elementary level Italian courses switched to the Vista Higher Learning online text (and workbook) a year and a half ago and I have heard nothing but positive feedback from them about the change. My LRC staff and I met with the Vista Higher Ed reps along with the Italian teachers to make sure we were all on the same page before the program went live. We also had one of the staff sit in on a class for the first term to try to scout out any potential problems since this is not only an electronic textbook, but a learning management system built around a textbook. The content itself was impressive, authentic and engaging. I am typically very unimpressed with commercial language learning products and generally encourage teachers to create and customize their own for their own needs. This is, of course, not always possible. Many of our Italian teachers are adjuncts and have heavy teaching loads so they do not have the luxury of creating such materials. I know that the automated grading of assignments has been very welcome by them.

One possible concern, at least with the way we are implementing it, is that they do biweekly testing on Fridays that requires access to enough computers for all the concurrent courses. We have four computer lab classrooms in our LRC and it is just enough to accomodate their needs.

I hope this is helpful.

Best,
Greg

Greg Kessler
Ohio University
http://ohiou.edu/linguistics/people/Kessler.html
http://lrc.Ohio.edu
http://call.Ohio.edu



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