Page 2292 When Old Languages Go Online: Latinum electronicum, a Latin Course on the Web Stefano Tardini NewMinE Lab / Latinum electronicum University of Lugano Switzerland stefano.tardini@lu.unisi.ch Irene Burch Latinum electronicum University of Basle Switzerland Irene.Burch@unibas.ch Simone Hiltscher Latinum electronicum University of Basle Switzerland Simone.Hiltscher@unibas.ch Abstract: Latinum electronicum is a project of the Swiss Virtual Campus. It aims at creating a web-based course to teach basic Latin to university beginners. The course will be available in German, French and Italian; it will be integrated into the existing Latin courses at the Swiss universities in alternation with courses taught in class. Latinum electronicum wants to turn the interactive and multimedia qualities of the internet to the best advantage. The learning platform adopted is WebCT. The whole course is divided into 23 lessons and some complementary modules. The exercises are the added value of Latinum electronicum: the course offers, in fact, more than 25 different kinds of exercises, developed with Macromedia Flash. Two different evaluation phases have been conducted at the Universities of Basle, Fribourg and Neuchâtel; the main results are presented in this paper. 1. Introduction: the Project Latinum electronicum ( www.unibas.ch/latinum-electronicum ) is a project of the Swiss Virtual Campus (SVC, www.virtualcampus.ch ), a programme of the Swiss Confederation entitled in 1999 to support new information and communication technology in higher education. The principal aim of the SVC is to develop teaching modules for basic and specialized study programmes, which are accessible via internet. Currently, 50 projects are involved in the SVC. The goal of Latinum electronicum is to create a web-based course to teach basic Latin to university beginners. As a result of the reform of Swiss school-leaving examination in 1995, more and more students enter university without any knowledge of Latin; but, on the university side, Latin remains ma ndatory for entering such university faculties as history, foreign languages, literature, theology and so on. As a consequence, Latin classes become overcrowded, because on the other side it is not possible to engage more Latin teachers. Latinum electronicum tries to solve this problem and to maintain the quality of these classes by providing a course which can be integrated into the existing Latin courses at the Swiss universities in alternation with courses taught in class. By transferring parts of the course to on-line studies, the number of hours of in-presence classes can be reduced and at the same time be used more effectively, since there remains more room for individual problems and questions. Latinum electronicum is currently available in three Swiss national languages: German, French and Italian. The project involves four different Swiss universities: • University of Basle: is the leading house and provides the coordination of the project and technical lead; • University of Lugano: provides translation and localization into Italian and technical implementation; • University of Neuchâtel: provides content development and translation and localization into French; • University of Zurich: provides content development and translation and localization into German.