Article: Digital Language-learning Initiative To Benefit 30 Vermont Schools

From http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20130114/NEWS07/301140010/Digital-language-learning-initiative-benefit-30-Vermont-schools?nclick_check=1

Digital language-learning initiative to benefit 30 Vermont schools
Online courses will be available to 30 Vermont middle schools and high schools at discounted price
by Tim Johnson
January 15, 2013

Middlebury Interactive Languages, a joint venture of Middlebury College and K12 Inc., a for-profit digital education provider, announced that it would be making its new online courses in five languages available to up to 30 Vermont middle schools and high schools at a “significant discount.”

The special offer for 30 Vermont schools — first-come, first-served — will offer online courses in French, Spanish, German, Latin and/or Chinese at a cost of $6,000 per school. Middlebury Interactive and Middlebury College will subsidize the Vermont program over four years to the tune of about $2.6 million, an expenditure that will cover content and on-site professional development training for teachers, among other things.

Meanwhile, Middlebury Interactive already has programs up and running in schools in other states.

Ron Liebowitz, Middlebury College president, said the college eventually hopes to receive income from Middlebury Interactive to offset the costs of higher education, but he added the main motivation was not financial. He said the college saw the new digital enterprise as a way to maintain its long-standing leadership in foreign-language instruction. The college has run a summer immersion language school for adults on its Middlebury campus for nearly a century, and another relatively new entity, the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy, has been holding residential summer academies for high school students at several sites around the country.

Read the full article at http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20130114/NEWS07/301140010/Digital-language-learning-initiative-benefit-30-Vermont-schools?nclick_check=1