AUTOR:     Frank Richter
AFILIACJA: Universitaet Tuebingen
TYTUŁ:     E-learning in Linguistics: Developing and Teaching
           "Grammar Formalisms and Parsing"

In this talk I will discuss the development of an e-learning course on
formal foundations of constraint-based grammar and grammar
implementation. The course was created in a research project which I
directed at the University of Tuebingen from the summer of 2001
through December 2003. The project was jointly conducted with
Prof. W. Detmar Meurers of The Ohio State University and Prof. Gerald
Penn of the University of Toronto as sub-contractors for the
development of teaching software. The course is still being taught in
Tuebingen to date, and there is ongoing work on improving the software
of the teaching applications and extending the subject matter of the
course.

E-learning courses were becoming popular among European and national
funding agencies about half a decade ago. The prominent goal was the
creation of high-quality teaching materials in certain 'centers of
excellence', which could then be exported easily to other teaching
institutions. The leading idea was, of course, that this way more
students could be reached with less effort, the quality of teaching
could be improved, and, most importantly, overall costs could be
reduced.

I will present detailed comments on all of these aspects of
e-learning, as well as on others which are typically less recognised
when one starts to think about it. The issues that I wish to cover
range from hardware and software requirements to the choice of the
course language (and its possibly unexpected implications), teaching
methods in the virtual classroom, problems of time and timing,
software maintenance, data security, the response of students to
e-learning (and how it changes over time), the possible use of
e-learning material outside its native setting, the effect of
e-learning on scientific developments, and, last but not least, what
linguistics and linguists might gain and lose.

If there is interest, I would also like to take time to discuss your
personal questions about any issues surrounding e-learning in general
and the course under discussion in particular.