Creating a Complete Online Environment for Ancient-Language Teaching

There are many reasons for creating online resources both to supplement in-person teaching and to lay the basis for a course taught entirely online. This paper aims to give an overview of the questions we ought to ask ourselves so that we can design exactly the resources or the course we need. Even an experienced classroom teacher may not be aware of all the elements that should be in place for an online and thus possibly more student-guided course to be successful. We thus begin by looking at very basic issues of learning space, time and patterns. Next, while ‘teaching a language’ or ‘knowing a language’ are precise-sounding aims, they unite a broad variety of activities and abilities. We thus suggest a series of questions that let instructors figure out what they mean by those terms, and then go through the various practical decisions that need to be made on that basis in order to set up exactly the course needed: we go through what course elements should be included, and the best ways of creating these given the academic services available electronically and online. Sometimes, more is better, but often, basic structures set up in a way possible even for time-strapped academics who are required to focus on publishing rather than teaching can go a long way. Finally, we introduce the examples of two complete online alt-ac set-ups (for both language and ‘content’ classes) as potential models for future courses.