Latinum electronicum

A web-based Latin course for beginners

Project Leader

Prof. Dr. Rudolf Wachter
Rudolf.Wachter@unibas.ch
Seminar für Klassische Philologie
Universität Basel
Nadelberg 6-8
4051 Basel

Project Coordinator

Irene Burch
Irene.Burch@unibas.ch
Latinum electronicum
Universität Basel
Bernoullistrasse 28
4056 Basel

Project Partners

Summary

The project aims at creating a program in order to teach basic Latin to university beginners. The program should supplement and finally replace the basic phase of the Latin courses taught both at Basel and at other universities in order to fulfill the Latin requirement of the Humanities Faculties. This means: (a) as to content, the program users will achieve basic translation competency; (b) as to didactics, the program is interactive and allows monitoring of the student by the teacher and feedbacks from the student to the teacher; it will be supplemented by tutoring groups; (c) as to accessibility, the program should be accessible on the Internet or Intranet; (d) as to users, it will be usable by all three language groups in Switzerland (this should result in additional marketing possibilities outside Switzerland).

In order to achieve these aims, the project consists of four different workgroups: (1) a programming workgroup which brings together communication and programming specialists from the University of Basel (Prof. Lusti) and from the Facoltà di Scienze della Comunicazione in Lugano; (2) a German language workgroup which brings together specialists for Latin teaching from the Universities of Basel (Prof. Wachter) and Zürich (Prof. Fuhrer); (3) a French language workgroup which is located at the University of Neuchatel (Prof. Aubert); (4) an Italian language workgroup which is located at the Facoltà di Scienze della Comunicazione in Lugano (Prof. Rigotti). These groups will work in close intercommunication with each other and with the project group; the leading house will be the Basel Seminar für Klassische Philologie (Prof. Wachter). Furthermore, in order to regularly evaluate the work of the project teams, there will be an advisory board in which members of all the seven Swiss Institues for Classical Philology will participate.

The project will present its final product after two years. Once established, the program will significantly help to avoid additional costs for basic Latin instruction at Unversity level. There is a double motivation for putting a Latin course on the net, a financial/political one due to the lack of Latin at maturity level and a scientific one.