The CourseShare Program: Fall 2026

Overview

Through the Big Ten Academic Alliance CourseShare program program, we are able to offer University of Minnesota students a wide range of language options, including the addition of newer languages that are rarely taught at American universities like Bangla, Filipino, Khmer and Tamil. Many students who choose to participate in CourseShare do so to learn the language of their family and heritage, so this program offers them more than just a language course. We also share language courses with partner universities in the Big Ten, increasing and diversifying the audience of our local language programs. 

This semester, approximately 130 students are participating in the program. Registration remains in flux, but there are about 70 Big Ten students taking one of our local language classes, and 60 University of Minnesota students taking a language course from a partner university. 

New event and other innovations

Later this month, we are launching an informal event, CourseShare and Cookies, which will introduce campus resources available to students learning a language taught at another university. We hope that this event will help build community among students, some of whom do not have peers from their language course on campus. 

The CourseShare website continues to grow, and now includes an FAQ for teaching faculty, This page may also prove useful to departmental staff.

Vietnamese is the first language program that offers CourseShare exchanges in both directions. We are sharing the newly developed heritage language course with the University of Chicago, and we are also receiving a traditional beginning course from Michigan State. This provides students with two pathways: one for traditional beginners, and another for heritage learners with previous experience using the language. Between these two classes, a total of 36 UMN students are now enrolled in Vietnamese language. 

Thank you to University of Minnesota language faculty

Coordinators, registrars, technologists, advisors and more support the CourseShare program, but the most important program leaders are the language faculty who volunteer to share their course with students across the Big Ten. They participate, even when it requires them to change their course modality, provide additional guidance as students are onboarded to new systems, and in some cases, greatly expand the number of students enrolled in their courses. 

We would like to thank the following language faculty, who 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: 

• Meraj Ahmed, who is sharing three levels of Urdu
• Zoe Brown, who is sharing three levels of Ojibwe
• Hangtae Cho, who is sharing Language & Society of the two Koreas
• Ingela-Selda Haaland, who is sharing two levels of Swedish
• Alexx James, who is sharing two levels of Dakota
• Khadar Jama, who is sharing two levels of Somali
• Sugyung Kim, who is sharing two levels of Korean
• Kyle Korynta, who is sharing beginning Norwegian
• Ky Nguyen, who is sharing the new Vietnamese class
• Lily Obeda, who is sharing three levels of Finnish