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Professor and Director Tim Oakes and Executive Director Danielle Rocheleau Salaz in the Center for Asian Studies in partnership with ALTEC, Anthropology, Geography and Religious Studies sought funding to create a certificate program in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies. They were awarded a 2020-2022  through the U.S. Department of Education.

The grant’s first goal aims to build a sustainable area studies curriculum in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies. This will be achieved through an instructor hire to teach an introductory level civilization course and regional courses, offering professional development grants to enhance curriculum, and generating student interest through enhanced programming.

The second goal is to enhance Directed Independent Language Study (DILS) instruction in Tibetan and Nepali for undergraduate students. Two instructors will be hired to teach these languages. In addition, a series of open access online learning modules has been developed to support student learning of Tibetan. ALTEC provided guidance on the creation of these resources using the Canvas platform to make the content available to the wider learning community as an Open Educational Resource (OER). The  was developed and created by Maggie Rosenau (they/she) and Tenzin Tsepak (he/him) and is now available on Canvas.

The final goal is to expand study abroad and other language opportunities for undergraduates studying Tibetan and Nepali. This will include providing language study scholarships for students looking to continue their language training beyond the introductory level and developing a new undergraduate global seminar in Nepal, India or Bhutan.

The Portugueses de Papel grant was originally funded by a ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder Research & Innovation Seed Grant in 2017-2018. Associate Professor Tania Martuscelli in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in partnership with ALTEC and ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Libraries then applied for a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant through the . They received recommendations to resubmit with revisions in light of the rise of digital humanities and the importance of Portuguese as a critical language in the U.S.

This project was an extraordinary effort with eight core members writing the proposal and further broke boundaries with its multidisciplinary, multinational, multigenerational and multi-ranked faculty, staff, graduate students and community.

Portugueses de Papel aimed to develop a digital database of Portuguese characters throughout Brazilian literature. This work fills the need of the Portuguese academic research community throughout the world who are completing literary analysis of thousands of novels and need a way to collect and run statistics on this gathered information. The platform created by ALTEC allows researchers to access information about a novel’s characters, such as their location, gender, race and social, economic, and employment status. This tool will be instrumental for researchers needing to analyze, for example, the professions of Portuguese immigrants in Brazil after the abolition of slavery in 1889, thus allowing the categorization of immigrants in a variety of ways.

After collecting literary analyses from over 100 researchers around the world, the project team translated the analyses into English and then used ALTEC’s recording studio to record audio of all submitted analyses in both English and Portuguese so that the research was accessible in both written and audio formats in two languages.

ALTEC then developed a database platform to enable indexing of all analyses and data. The project team is enthusiastic that this lays the groundwork for future derivative research to take place and is an example of how to engage in digital humanities research.

Professor and Director Tim Oakes and Executive Director Danielle Rocheleau Salaz in the Center for Asian Studies in partnership with ALTEC, Anthropology, , Geography, History and Sociology sought funding to establish a Southeast Asian track in the Asian Studies BA. They were awarded a 2017-2019 through the U.S. Department of Education.

The grant’s first goal was to increase Southeast Asian area studies. This was achieved through an instructor hire in Geography and course development grants to create five new and revise one area studies course across four departments.

The second goal was to introduce additional Southeast Asian languages at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder. Two instructors were hired to teach Indonesian and Thai classes and develop  and . ALTEC contributed significantly to create these as Open Educational Resources (OER) using the Canvas platform to make the content available to the wider learning community. Indonesian continues to be taught for credit at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ with Fulbright funding and Thai was offered in 2019-2020 through ALTEC’s non-credit language classes program.

The final goal was to support and encourage study abroad in Southeast Asia, which was accomplished by creating a new partnership with Gadjah Mada University and funding ten scholarships. The grant also facilitated a faculty-led Global Seminar, developed and offered by Anthropology.

Thanks to the successful grant work, the new Southeast Asian track in the Asian Studies BA has been submitted for approval to the College of Arts & Sciences.

An in-residence summer program has taken place at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ since 2010 to support Chinese language teacher professional development. This program is made possible by a national project funded by the National Security Agency. This summer program is led by Project Director Jon Zeljo in the Program for Teaching East Asia (affiliated with the Center for Asian Studies) in partnership with ALTEC.

The summer 2019 theme “Chinese Language Instruction in the Digital Age” aimed to incorporate learner-centered technology tools into the curriculum. Participants learned from language technology specialists, experienced Chinese language curriculum designers, and master teachers from successful programs. Through daily sessions they gained an understanding of and competency in a variety of technologies around which they can create effective and engaging lessons.

ALTEC has contributed by providing classroom space, access to our resources, and presenting cutting-edge technology tools.