Linguistic Engineering Team

The Virtual Linguistics Campus, also known as the VLC, is the world's leading e-learning platform for linguistics and is fully integrated into regular university teaching. Being the result of a five-year research and development effort conducted by a multidisciplinary team from the universities of Duisburg-Essen, Marburg, and Wuppertal, the VLC today has set new standards in e-education. It offers a wide variety of certified courses and course material for theoretical and applied linguistics, linguistic engineering, and teacher training. Furthermore, it includes various linguistic tools and all the communicative facilities necessary for successful e-learning. All VLC courses can be studied either completely online or in a blended-learning format.

In traditional teaching, content delivery and content acquisition are realized in class where several dozens of students have to gather at the same time to be entertained by their teacher. In a second phase, they practise on their own: on the basis of additional exercise material, homework tasks, etc.

The "Inverted Classroom Model" (ICM) reverses these activities: Content acquisition is now self-guided, takes place first and is done online. The additional in class phase is dedicated to practising, rehearsing, discussion, analysis, etc.

To realize this inversion the following conditions must be met:

Phase 1: Self-guided Learning must be supported efficiently.
Phase 2: In-Class Teaching needs to be reorganized.

Furthermore, there should be a significant gain in quantity and quality in using the ICM.