Darton College in Albany, Georgia offers Spanish classes online for students in state and out of state. At: http://online.darton.edu/ you will find all of the information that you need in terms of when the classes are offered and how to enroll. Each college that offers Spanish online differs in the area of required materials and assignments. I’ve found that Darton’s online program is set up in a user friendly way.
Each semester Spanish I and Spanish II are offered online. Darton does an “A” semester, which is the traditional four month semester, and also a “B” semester. The “B” semesters are two month semesters available in the Spring and Fall. There are Spanish I and II classes during both the “A” and “B” semesters. Spanish III and IV are also offered online at Darton College. Spanish III is in the Fall and Spanish IV is in the Spring. These classes are not offered in the summer.
Most of the work you do will take place in “Vistas”. This is the online textbook program that is used. Go to: http://vistas.vhlcentral.com/ to see how this program runs. There is an option to view a guided tour of ho w the lesson and assignments work. Spanish I covers the first four lessons and Spanish II covers the next four. So you will only need to buy the online text package once if you need both of those classes. For each lesson your instructor will assign different tutorials, exercises and assessments within Vistas. The exercises consist of filling in the blank, listening to a passage in Spanish and answering questions and recording your voice in Spanish responding to questions. If your computer doesn’t have a microphone attached you will need to buy one. These are pretty cheap at places like Best Buy or Circuit City.
The communication between the instructor and students happens in Web Ct. This is where the announcements are posted, discussions occur and grades are posted. At the end of the semester students take a written final and an oral final. For the oral final students listen to prerecorded questions in Spanish that they then answer and submit to the instructor. There is a final research paper on a chosen topic that has to do with Hispanic culture too.
Taking an online Spanish course with Darton requires about the same amount of time and work as any of the other colleges that offer similar programs. I would say a student needs to put about six hours of work in per week to be successful. This time is spent watching the tutorials, completing the lesson exercises and taking the assessments all within the Vistas program.
I would recommend Darton’s online Spanish classes to anyone who is comfortable learning online. A language class online can be tough for the type of student who usually asks a lot of questions. If you have already taken an online class before you will know if you are the type of student who can handle online learning. For those who don’t mind the limitations of distance education it is a very convenient way to satisfy your Spanish credit hours.
