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CU-Boulder launches intensive, online course in ancient Greek. You could call it ‘boot camp.’ Just don’t call it a ‘MOOC’

Perhaps you’ve concluded that reading “The Iliad” in English dilutes the power of the epic poem. Maybe you’re heading to graduate school and realize that learning ancient Greek is required. Perhaps you attend a college that does not teach Greek or Classics, but you want that background.

For the past two summers, the University of Colorado Boulder has met those needs. It has offered a concentrated online course that immerses students in ancient Greek, allowing them to take two semesters of Greek—and study an entire Greek textbook—in 10 weeks.

This course was the brainchild of a former CU-Boulder Classics student who saw the unmet need and helped fund the labor-intensive endeavor. It is taught by Laurialan Reitzammer, assistant professor of classics, and Mitchell Pentzer, a Ph.D. student in classics.

To be clear, the course is online, but it is not a Massive, Open Online Course—or MOOC—which have unlimited participation, low completion rates, and minimal interaction with instructors.

Reitzammer has this to say about her course: “It is so not a MOOC.” It is small, extremely interactive and rigorously scheduled.

“Teaching ancient Greek is a delicate, complicated, very difficult, and at times, unfortunately, miserable-for-the-student process,” Reitzammer says. The online ancient-Greek course is limited to 25 students per session, to ensure the necessary level of engagement with students.

“What we wanted was constant interaction with the students. That’s why this class is incredibly time-consuming in terms of teaching,” she says.

In addition to recording a lecture for each of the 50 chapters in the textbook, Reitzammer and Pentzer record “dialogue” videos of themselves, in which Pentzer pretends to be a student discussing the lessons with Reitzammer.

Additionally, students can join two or three online chat sessions with an instructor each day.

“To teach ancient Greek, you need a lot of hand-holding” and small class size, Pentzer says. “Some students just can’t wrap their heads around participles, while other students can’t understand declining a noun.”

In class, an instructor can correct a student immediately. “When you’re doing it online, you don’t get to answer every student’s question, or you don’t get to correct them live all the time, so to deal with that, you have to correct their homework much more stringently, much more intensively.”

That’s another reason the class is capped at 25 students, Reitzammer adds.

“We’re doing 50 chapters, two semesters, in 10 weeks, over the summer,” says Pentzer.

“Which is insane,” adds Reitzammer. “It’s boot camp.”

"When you’re doing it online, you don’t get to answer every student’s question, or you don’t get to correct them live all the time, so to deal with that, you have to correct their homework much more stringently, much more intensively.”

The full course includes 50, short lecture videos (about 15 to 20 minutes apiece), one video for each chapter. In those videos, which are narrated PowerPoint presentations, Reitzammer introduces students to concepts and grammar.

Then there are the 50 dialogue videos, which simulate the classroom setting. “If they were taking a real, brick-and-mortar class, they would get this kind of experience.”

Students are expected to read each chapter, then watch the corresponding lecture video, then try to complete the homework assignment and, to check their work, watch the dialogue video.

Additionally, they take a quiz every day and a test every week.

MOOCs are called “asynchronous,” because students can study at their own pace, irrespective of what the instructors are doing. But CU-Boulder’s online, ancient Greek course is synchronous, meaning students and instructors interact each day. “It is not self-paced,” she emphasizes.

Pentzer also recorded introductory videos about orthography—how to write letters. “That’s something you do if you’re in a classroom but is very difficult to do if you don’t have a whiteboard,” he says.

Pentzer uses a digital whiteboard, which allows him to record how to write Greek letters. “It’s all very elementary, but it’s a brand-new alphabet for these students. You don’t want gammas to look like cursive y’s or alphas to look like lowercased a’s.”

Former student and donor John Nebel helped fund the online course.

When Nebel took the course in CU-Boulder’s brick-and-mortar setting, Pentzer recorded all of his lectures and posted them online. The idea was to help students handle the large amount of material even with the limited number of hours during which students had contact with instructors. Nebel, who works in computer science, thought the idea was inspired.

“He is passionate about the classics, but he’s also hip to the times. And he thinks that if Classics wants to stay afloat, we need to start moving things online,” Pentzer says.

As Nebel phrased it, “Learning Greek and Latin is the price of admission to studying the Classics.”

Nebel wanted CU-Boulder to bring Greek to the world. Nebel lives in Boulder and could come to campus, but many people live elsewhere. An online Greek class addressed several needs and constraints. One is that demand for the course in any one place is generally small.

“What’s great about this class is that there are a lot of people in this country and other countries who really want to take ancient Greek for very particular reasons,” Reitzammer says.

Greek is not just a language but also a system of thought.

For instance, the course serves those who want to attend graduate school but might have decided too late in their college careers to take Greek and Latin.

The course also serves those who don’t have easy access to a post-baccalaureate program, students who might be home for the summer, students attending colleges or universities that don’t have classics departments.

A minority of those enrolling are CU-Boulder students—three or four out of 25 in each of the past two years.

Reitzammer empathizes with those who find themselves needing Greek and Latin after earning a bachelor’s degree. Her own degree was in comparative literature.

“I decided after I had my B.A. that I wanted to study Greek and Latin, that I wanted to go to grad school for classics,” she recalls. So she moved to Los Angeles to attend UCLA’s post-baccalaureate program in Classics.

“I spent three full years doing nothing but reading Greek and Latin, essentially, before I went to grad school.”

The CU-Boulder online ancient Greek course essentially allows such people to take a year’s worth of Greek in a short time.

“To really flourish in a graduate program, you’ve got to have Greek and Latin,” Reitzammer says.

The online course is a concentrated way to get that first year of Greek under one’s belt. “Either way we cut it—10 weeks or 32 weeks—their Greek tool bag is full. They’ve met all the different grammatical functions, all the different declensions and conjugations. It’s just that they aren’t as practiced using them yet.”

Reitzammer and Pentzer have several answers to the question of why one should learn Greek and Latin and study Classics.

“We teach classics because we want human beings to be able to think in the world and make decisions and think critically, and a classics degree gives you all this,” Reitzammer says.

Learning Greek and Latin is “incredible exercise for your brain, and you get to delve into the structure of this highly complex language.”

Pentzer tells students the study of classics will help them enjoy life more. “They’ll understand much more of the world around them. They’ll understand art, literature and movies, because these are only the two most influential cultures for the last 2,500 years.”

Greek, Pentzer says, is not just a language but also a system of thought. “We often don’t think about how we think in a language until we learn another one. When that other language is so radically different from your own native language, it has that much more benefit for you.”

People solve problems with thoughts and think in language, he says. “So the more languages you have, the more modes of thought you have, the more angles you can come at a problem.”

To learn more about CU-Boulder’s Online Classical Greek course, click .

Clint Talbott is director of communications and external relations manager for the College of Arts and Sciences and editor of the College of Arts and Sciences Magazine.