Mission of the Multimedia Learning Center

The mission of the MMLC is to support and facilitate the teaching by Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences faculty in all academic areas by raising awareness of and assisting in the effective implementation of emerging technologies and innovative pedagogical methods. Beyond its role within WCAS and Northwestern, the MMLC maintains a leadership role among humanities computing and language teaching centers nationwide.

Challenges and partners:

Historically, the MMLC focused on the humanities, and particularly language learning. Today the MMLC facilitates technology in teaching for all areas of WCAS. In addition, the MMLC assists instructors and strategic planners by evaluating the impact of technology within the academic environment and providing recommendations for the more effective integration of technology into the educational process.

The MMLC periodically reassesses its strategies and methods to align itself with the goals of WCAS. The MMLC supports the larger WCAS commitments to collaboration involving undergraduate students with faculty research, building stronger professional ties and partnerships with Chicago institutions and businesses, and expanding an international focus. The MMLC/Hewlett Summer Internship program is a collaborative effort between MMLC professional staff, undergraduate student interns, and WCAS faculty to create innovative pedagogical tools. This faculty-student interaction extends through the academic year in the Faculty Development Lab of the MMLC. The MMLC collaborates with scholars, dignitaries, and institutions in the Chicago area and internationally; such collaborations include the various cultural offices of foreign consulates such as the Goethe Institute, the Japan Foundation and the French Cultural Services, the Chicago Public Schools' Office of Language and Cultural Education, and the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Through its extensive work with foreign language instruction, the MMLC is a ready source to bring technology solutions to the internationalization of WCAS.

The expertise and infrastructure of the MMLC are particularly suited for language instruction. With proven leadership in the field of language learning, the MMLC works closely with the Council on Language Instruction (CLI), a group of select representatives from the language departments at Northwestern. In addition to providing a wide array of audiovisual services and support essential to teaching, the MMLC offers hands-on training to both faculty and students, environments for language testing with specialized hardware and software, and development of custom courseware. In conjunction with the CLI, the MMLC developed the world's first online language placement tests. Year after year, both content and technology are further refined and enhanced, simplifying the placement process and maintaining leadership in the field of online assessment. In addition to meeting technological needs, its labs foster the interactions between students and instructors that are essential to language learning. Among the recent innovations developed by the Center, DiLL, the Digital Language Lab offers means to enhance students' listening comprehension and pronunciation abilities. The system is an advanced software alternative to an analog language lab, using the computer and network resources of the MMLC. DiLL has not only reproduced the features available on analog systems but it has extended and enhanced the pedagogy in ways that are only possible in a digital realm. Used in a controlled laboratory environment for instruction and testing, DiLL can also be used in a distributed fashion for individual practice. Presently, the Department of Linguistics and the Program of African and Asian Languages (PAAL) actively use DiLL. As increased emphasis is placed on students’ accuracy, other departments have expressed a desire to integrate the use of DiLL into their methodologies.

Working with Academic Technologies (NUIT) and Digital Collections (NU Library), the MMLC can leverage both its expertise in humanities and language instruction and its unique relationship with the faculty of WCAS to build best-of-breed solutions within the interdisciplinary scope of WCAS. The MMLC can benefit from Academic Technologies’ open source consortium relationships and the Digital Media Services’ access to Library resources and advanced image handling tools. Together with the Department of Art History, and the Visual Media Collection (VMC) of Digital Collections, this group: MMLC – AT – DC/VMC is working towards a digital storage, retrieval, and classroom presentation methodology to replace the traditional glass slide collection in Art History.