ELI was a trailblazer when it came to developing online courses. ELI’s first online graduate course sections, some of the very first at U-M, launched in 2015, and ELI 210 Academic Vocabulary was the first online undergraduate course to be approved by U-M’s College of LSA, in February 2020. From the beginning, Lecturer IV Pamela Bogart has been leading the way for ELI’s online efforts. In addition to ELI 210, Pamela created two courses as part of ELI’s initial online pilot in 2015, ELI 510 Academic Reading and Vocabulary and ELI 521 Academic Writing I, both still running today. She also created and continues to teach Preparing for Graduate Success at the University of Michigan, an online pre-arrival summer course for new U-M graduate students, and in 2017 saw the launch of Pamela’s (and ELI’s) first online course for a global audience on the Coursera platform, Preparing for Graduate Study in the U.S., which recently enrolled its 30,000th learner.
This impressive milestone coincides with the rollout of Pamela’s top-to-bottom revamp of the course to meet the needs of today’s prospective students around the world preparing for graduate study in the U.S. New elements include short video clips featuring U-M graduate students and faculty sharing tips on how to thrive in a new academic culture and guided experiences in which participants explore the campus culture and student support services at their target institutions. All participants who complete the course gain a host of networking strategies and language resources.
Bogart credits the course’s success at least in part to its highly interactive structure. “Each learner brings wisdom to the course,” she says, “and helps to shape this growing community of global scholars.” With over 2,400 learners enrolled since the relaunch, this global community of scholars continues to grow, and Pamela continues to innovate in the online learning space: Watch for the the launch of her second Coursera course “Learning Languages with AI” in August 2024!
