Hi Derek,
Some of our faculty who have adopted TalkAbroad are dropping supplemental textbooks in order to keep student materials costs reasonable. TalkAbroad recommends five conversations per semester, which would be $50 per student. I'm a little unclear how you are calculating the $160?
Our take on it is that this provides an enormous amount of communicative material. Each conversation is preceded by an assignment designed to focus on the planned topic and scaffold the student's participation, then the conversation itself, followed by a detailed review -- by the student and sometimes by the instructor -- of the recording of the conversation, culminating in a written assignment in which the student touches on questions raised by the conversation, new language learned in connection with the conversation, cultural information gleaned from the conversation, regrets about the conversation, etc. What I am hearing from faculty is that students are willing to do this reflective step with great rigor and energy, and this is where some "teachable moments" present themselves.
I probably sound like a shill for TalkAbroad. I'm not on their payroll, but I have drunk the Koolaid.
Let me just say that I met Todd Nichols at either ACTFL or IALLT about seven years ago, and I came back to Harvard and asked a few faculty if they might like to try TalkAbroad, which was then new, but nothing ended up happening. Then last year, we were able to get a few faculty on board, and it has burst like fireworks. I am kicking myself for not promoting it more aggressively to our faculty when I first learned about it. People had legitimate concerns: "Well, it costs money, and ideally we'd able to set up partnerships with other universities in target-language countries so it wouldn't be commercial." And in fact, our Portuguese language program has a very successful partnership arrangement going with Brazilian universities under "Teletandem." But, in my experience, aside from the very successful and well-organized Teletandem program, these partnerships are generally very high-maintenance and do not last long. They tend to be based on the efforts and energies of a single dynamic faculty member on each side, and when faculty move on, the programs unravel. It's unfortunate that it works this way, but this is the struggle that makes TalkAbroad excellent value, in my judgment. They do the legwork, train the conversation partners, supervise the interactions, troubleshoot technical issues, and provide ongoing continuity. These are all the things I do not have the staffing or cycles to do myself. Furthermore, the cost of doing it ourselves "non-commercially" would undoubtedly be much higher, considering the high cost of personnel, at least here in the Boston area.
My two cents.
Thom