Acceso is a complete, interactive curriculum for intermediate-level learners of Spanish. The materials on the site are provided freely to the public and are intended as a replacement for commercial textbooks, which are generally ill-suited to the learning outcomes now considered crucial to successful language study. These materials are supplemented by an online workbook built on the MySpanishLab platform of Pearson Education, Inc., as well as detailed lesson plans, rubrics for the evaluation of student work, and reliable instruments for measuring student progress and learning outcomes. Winner of 2012 Computer Assisted Language Consortium (CALICO) Focus Award

Reviews
CALICO Journal 29.2 (Jan 2012): 398-405.
Hispania 95.2 (June 2012): 365-366

Au boulot! is a two-year college French program consisting of: a textbook, workbook and 21 accompanying audio exercises; as well as a reference grammar, to be used the entire two years. We also insist that our students obtain a full-sized dictionary, and we recommend the HARPER-COLLINS-ROBERT bilingual New Standard Edition. (Instructors will note in reviewing the materials that we provide vocabulary lists at the ends of chapters, with translations, but no glossary. We have become convinced after years of experience that glossaries are counter-productive. It is vital that students learn to use dictionaries, and the sooner the better.)

Dobra forma (Good Form) provides a web-based overview of Ukrainian grammar with contextualized activities that enable students to internalize correct grammatical forms as they focus on the communication of meaning. This approach recognizes that students need to see, hear, and process a target structure in context multiple times before they can reliably produce it themselves. The modules begin with activities that encourage students to comprehend what is said or written before they focus on how the target structure encodes that meaning; and only after these crucial, initial steps will the students proceed to activities in which they produce the target structures themselves. Known in Second Language Studies as structured input and structured output, these activities will enable students to gain an implicit knowledge of grammar that will increase their ability to interpret new structures.

Ethical and Policy Considerations for Digitizing Traditional Knowledge is a comprehensive instructional resource designed to introduce library professionals to the ethical and policy issues which accompany the digitization of traditional knowledge collections. This instructional resource includes a lesson plan, a slide deck, a case study with accompanying worksheet, and an annotated bibliography. Instructors will lead students through a lesson plan which includes identification of prior knowledge, direct instruction, guided practice and independent practice. Through this “I do, we do, you do” approach, students will learn about the definition of traditional knowledge, how and why it might be preserved, ethical considerations when preserving it, and examples of traditional knowledge collections. The resource also includes an opportunity for students to work through an authentic case study from a library which digitized a traditional knowledge collection. Using a worksheet that includes guided criteria, students can review the case study to determine how the community was considered within each stage of the digital content lifecycle. The resource also includes background reading on digitizing and preserving traditional knowledge with brief annotations for both instructors and students.

One of the most difficult issues for educators, when faced with a copyright problem, is simply knowing where
to begin -- which parts of the legal rules and doctrines apply to the specific problem? To deal with this uncertainty, we suggest working through the following five questions, in the order they are presented. They are simple questions, but they are not easy to answer; by working through them in order, it is possible to identify which of the parts of copyright law apply to the specific problem or fact pattern that you need to address.

An introductory textbook of the modern standard Uyghur language with exercises and extensive grammatical analysis. With the accompanying audio, the textbook is designed for self-study or a one-year classroom course.

Hujambo! provides a complete curriculum for introductory Kiswahili that chronicles the adventures of two American students studying abroad in Tanzania for an academic year. It is designed for an introductory Kiswahili course at the college level with approximately 150 contact hours of instruction (5 hours a week for two 15-week semesters, or 5 hours a week for three 10-week quarters). It provides a foundational understanding of Kiswahili and the cultures of those who share it as a common language. Students will acquire the basics of Kiswahili grammar and build a core vocabulary of approximately 1,000 words, including the most common words for everyday interactions and the individual vocabulary they need to speak about their own academic and personal lives.

The concept of Data-Driven Learning, the use of corpora in instructed second language acquisition, can be traced to the late 1980s. Despite fifty years of use and a substantial body of literature showing their efficacy in the classroom, language corpora are far from a common pedagogical tool. In fact, teachers attempting to move from theory to praxis will find very few pedagogical manuals or user-friendly corpus tutorials, especially for languages other than English. Incorporating Corpora provides an online manual on the use of corpora to teach German to English-speaking learners. It includes a brief overview of research in Data-Driven Learning, a guide for using Das Digitale Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, and a selection of corpus-based assignments piloted in KU German courses. The manual is be the basis for a series of K-16 teacher workshops during which teachers will explore the use of language corpora in language teaching and will be invited to submit their own activities for inclusion in the project.

This ebook provides a unique pedagogical approach to teaching the fundamentals of communication systems using interactive graphics and in-line questions. The material opens with describing the transformation of bits into digital baseband waveforms. Double-sideband suppressed carrier modulation and quadrature modulation then provide the foundation for the discussions of Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK), Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK), M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (M-QAM), M-ary Phase Shift Keying (MPSK), and the basic theory of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). Traditional analog modulation systems are also described. Systems trade-offs, including link budgets, are emphasized. Interactive graphics allow the students to engage with and visualize communication systems concepts. Interactivity and in-line review questions enables students to rapidly examine system tradeoffs and design alternatives. The topics covered build upon each other culminating with an introduction to the implementation of OFDM transmitters and receivers, the ubiquitous technology used in WiFi, 4G and 5G communication systems.

Kids' Vid is an instructional web site that gives teachers and students the tools necessary to implement video production in the classroom. Kids? Vid is part of 4Teachers.org. A free service for teachers in public and non-profit schools, grades k-12, with sole funding provided by ALTEC at the University of Kansas.

Konuşan Paragraflar (Talking Paragraphs) takes a process-oriented and student-centered approach geared specifically for Anglophone learners of Turkish trying to move from the intermediate to the advanced level. Activities are guided by the three modes of communication (interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational) and the exploration of authentic materials will be structured to encourage cross-cultural comparisons. Learning outcomes are clearly provided at the beginning of each unit with grammar and vocabulary introduced in a carefully controlled manner and with a wide variety of activity types that increase in complexity over the course of the unit. Chapters in this project will be released in a serialized fashion as they are completed.

While resources abound for students working to achieve an intermediate level of proficiency, many students struggle with the transition to the more broadly focused classes at the advanced level. Le pont is intended to bridge this gap while promoting cultural understanding of the varied groups of people who share French as a common language. It requires students to analyze target structures within context and make their own observations about when and how those structures are used. Providing students with this preview of the target structures will allow learning through a flipped model, freeing up class time to work on more open-ended communicative activities that explore the Francophone world.

The goal of this project is to provide high-quality, accessible primary sources to those teaching and studying the histories and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world and the indigenous peoples of Latin America. Our modules cover a wide range of topics, but all consist of the same essential parts:

We have developed this open access book for universities and colleges responding to the needs and interests of students preparing for careers in health or even seeking to add a “health track” to their majors or minors. Para vivir offers an introduction to reading different literary and cultural texts from the Spanish-speaking world with a thematic focus on health. It can be used as an alternative to the standard Introduction to Hispanic Literature course texts, as it also teaches techniques of close reading. It incorporates authors from seventeen counties, has an almost even representation of male and female authors and diverse communities in the Hispanic world (European, Creole, Afro Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, Jewish). In addition to introductions to reading different genres (narrative, poetry, theater, and film) we have scaffolded supporting material such as biographies, notes on the historical contexts, pre and post-reading questions.

This textbook covers content relevant to COMS342 Problem Solving in Teams and Groups at the University of Kansas.

Move over, Cyrillic, and move over, Case… Verbs are what makes Russian really tough, and verbal aspect is the crown jewel of its difficulty. Russian aspect is complex in all of its dimensions—verbs are marked for aspect by an array of prefixes and suffixes, and the usage of perfective and imperfective verbs can be mysterious even for those who have learned Russian for years. Adding to this complexity is the fact that aspect is inextricably intertwined with other parts of Russian grammar (case and voice, to name two big ones). It should therefore come as no surprise that Russian aspect has exercised linguists—or aspectologists, as they call themselves—for a century or more.

The textbook is meant to be a general, and simplified, introduction to the subject matter. This textbook treats small business management as a practical human activity rather than as an abstract theoretical concept. The hope is to teach concepts that can be immediately applied to “real world” experiences and case studies. This book incorporates the use of technology and e-business as a way to gain a competitive advantage over larger rivals. Technology is omnipresent in today’s business world and small businesses must use it to their advantage. Practical discussions and examples of how a small business can use these technologies without having extensive expertise or expenditures are found within the readings. Cash flow is extremely important to small businesses. This book explicitly acknowledges the constant need to examine how decisions affect cash flow by incorporating cash flow impact content. As the lifeblood of all organizations, cash flow implications must be a factor in all business decision-making. Finally, this textbook recognizes the need to clearly identify sources of customer value and bring that understanding to every decision. Decisions that do not add to customer value should be seriously reconsidered.

Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy is a contemporary, interdisciplinary public speaking textbook that fuses rhetoric, critical/cultural studies, and performance to offer an up-to-date resource for students. With a focus on advocacy, this textbook invites students to consider public speaking as a political, purposeful form of information-sharing.

Tajik Persian: Readings in History, Culture and Society seeks to help students develop reading proficiency in Tajik at advanced level through authentic texts written for native speakers and provides them glimpses into the history, culture and society of Tajikistan without losing its focus on cultural aspects of the country—an aspect that constitutes a core component in the second language acquisition. The book can be adopted by instructors as a supplementary or the main textbook for advanced-level courses.

听一听 – Ting Yi Ting
The acquisition of lexical tone is often cited by Anglophone learners of Mandarin Chinese as the most daunting hurdle in learning the spoken language. Indeed, the challenges of lexical tones, in addition to the opaque writing system, contribute significantly to the classification of Mandarin Chinese as one of the most difficult for English speakers to learn. Hanyu Pinyin is a highly useful tool that enables learners to look up new words in a bilingual dictionary, to type Chinese characters, and to read and pronounce the names of unfamiliar people and places. However, because instruction in Pinyin is not communicative in nature, and extensive work would impinge upon valuable class time, it is usually given scant attention as a learning tool. Ting Yi Ting (Listening Makes Perfect) is an online guide that enables learners to hear and identify phonemic categories in Mandarin, including lexical tones, in a variety of phonetic contexts, and to associate those phonemes with correct Pinyin orthography. The project presents a new approach that is specifically geared toward native speakers of English and includes extensive audio examples and computer-graded comprehension checks.