Arabic Without Walls Awards
I have the pleasure to inform you that your web site, Arabic Without Walls, was selected by the evaluation committee as the winner of the 2008 Esperanto "Access to Language Education" Award. The Computer-Aided Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO), the Esperantic Studies Foundation, and Lernu.net give this prize each year to an outstanding language learning web site. The Award will be presented during the CALICO Banquet, at the 2008 Annual Symposium in San Francisco, on March 21, 2008.
The Arabic Without Walls site was chosen for the richness and depth of its materials in support of learning Arabic. This is a critical language, with too few options for study, especially in a distance-learning context. The evaluation committee was impressed with the resources that Arabic Without Walls can offer to individual learners, both within the University's course programs, and for those attempting to learn on their own. We felt that the integration of the web materials with the textbook and DVD offered a more effective learning paradigm than any of these modalities could provide by itself.
Arabic Without Walls is very professionally done, both in terms of pedagogy and in terms of web implementation. It offers many innovative features, including nice use of video and audio. Evaluators were impressed with the integration of cultural elements at many levels of the language, including historical and etymological glosses and explanations in some of the grammar and vocabulary sections. We hope that Arabic Without Walls will continue to expand and enhance its materials, and to support Arabic education for both your students and for the larger language learning community.
I look forward to presenting the award to you at the CALICO Annual Symposium. Once again, congratulations on your outstanding site.
CALICO ALE Evaluation Committee
2010 Distance Education Course Award (K-12)
University Continuing Education Association’s Community of Practice for Distance Learning
(for high school course “Arab 41: First-year Arabic Part I”)
“The Program of Excellence award is given annually to a credit and/or a non-credit distance-delivered instructional program that is exemplary in meeting the needs of students. The award recognizes new and innovative programs that utilize one or more forms of instruction at a distance.”
UPCEA 2012 K-12 Distance Learning Course Award results