CourseShare Continues to Expand Student Choice
The CourseShare program is underway for Spring 2025. CourseShare allows undergraduate and graduate students to access the language instruction they need to achieve their personal and professional goals. It connects students to the language of their heritage, and bridges communication with friends and family. It supports local and international research initiatives. CourseShare classes can be used to complete an undergraduate or graduate degree requirement or for a more personal reason.
UMN offers a wealth of languages locally, including many languages that are important heritage languages of the Twin Cities area, including Dakota, Ojibwe, Somali, Oromo (new language!), Hmong and Urdu.
Despite these options, critical gaps remain in language availability for students, and this is where the languages offered through CourseShare step in.
Coordinators, registrars, technologists, advisors and more support the CourseShare program, but the most important program leaders are the language instructors who volunteer to share their course with students across the Big Ten. Because we share our language programs, UMN students can access languages like Akan, Persian, Thai and Turkish.
The following instructors: Meraj Ahmed, Zoe Brown, Ingela-Selda Eilert Haaland, Elijah Hopkins, Khadar Jama, Kyle Korynta, C̣aƞte Máza, Angaluki Muaka, Lily Obeda, Jenneke Oosterhoff, Renana Schneller Miigwan Totz, and Fatima Walji Han were willing to accept the additional instructional and administrative work of the CourseShare program in order to promote their language and culture to a broader audience.
Here are some highlights about the courses that UMN instructors are sharing:
- Some are being shared with students at three universities simultaneously, including Beginning Ojibwe (Zoe Brown) and Advanced Modern Hebrew (Renana Schneller)
- We are sharing Swahili (Angaluki Muaka) in the Big Ten for the first time
- We are sharing all of our Northern European languages offered through the GNSD department: Dutch (Jenneke Oosterhoff), Finnish (Lily Obeda), Norwegian (Kyle Korynta) and Swedish (Ingela-Selda Eilert Haaland).
Language instructors are the engine of the CourseShare program, and the key to its success.
