The online challenge: how to design, build, and implement student-centered online introductory German language courses at the college level

Helga Wagenleiter
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:45:12 PDT

Online teaching has become a regular delivery method at higher education institutions, and with education shifting from traditional classrooms to online, instructors are encouraged to teach their courses online. In 2015, and with the assistance of eCampus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I started developing professional online courses from previous face-to-face courses. I not only transposed/translated my teaching approach to an online format; I built a professional online course with an architecture that is my own design. To better understand the transition from teaching in the classroom to online, I wanted to hear from students who had taken both types of courses. This led to the included project, “The Online Challenge,” which describes and explains the process of translating and transposing faceto-face courses and their teaching approaches into professionally designed online courses. It gives insight into the differences between teaching a foreign language course face-to-face and online, as well as the students’ opinions about those differences. Now, eight years later, the German department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks is offering eight different 100- and 200-level online college courses in the German language. Student numbers have tripled, eCampus uses the architecture of my course for the development of other courses at the university, and my design has been recognized and chosen to be presented at a national conference by the American Online Consortium, the premier organization for online learning. Hopefully, other colleagues making the switch to online learning find inspiration from this paper for their field and student body.