ANVILL: Transforming Language Education Across the Internet

Kazuko Page teaches Japanese at Grant High School in Portland, Oregon. Part of her work involves giving her Portland-based students learning Japanese time to interact with Japanese students learning English in Hiroshima, Japan. Page and her Japanese counterpart have their students record themselves learning their new language. In front of web cams the students talk about what their average days looks like, and what their favorite stores are, typical things for second-language learners. The two teachers then send the recordings digitally from Portland to Hiroshima and vice versa. There is a little bit of waiting—Hiroshima is 16 hours ahead of Portland—but nothing, says Page, like it used to be. Page, who has taught Japanese going on  16 years, says in the past to have her students interact with other students across time zones and an ocean involved videotaping each student and then sending the tapes back and forth from Japan to the United States. And waiting, says Page, lots of waiting. “You wouldn’t hear from them for a long time, and by the time you did you might have forgotten. They send you the tapes back, you say, ‘oh what was this all about?’”

These days, circumstances are significantly different. Today, Page and her Portland students communicate with students learning English in Japan using a service created by and hosted at the University of Oregon called ANVILL.

A language-learning tool

ANVILL stands for A Natural Virtual Language Lab, and like other course management systems such as Blackboard—a popular course management system used by UO and many universities nation-wide—ANVILL allows teachers to create and organize their courses and receive assignments back from their students. But ANVILL, a project created by UO’s Yamada Language Center, has been designed specifically for language instructors and their students. “Because it [ANVILL] is focused on speech and the production of oral language,” says Yamada Language Center Director and ANVILL designer Jeff Magoto, “it is easier for teachers to get in and get oral lessons back from students than in other systems.”

ANVILL features have been designed specially to help language instructors. These features include Voiceboards, the program Page used, which acts as a kind of bulletin board system allowing teachers to post lessons on particular subjects: vocabulary, comprehension, mastery of the language, etc. Students can then respond by making video recordings of themselves speaking their new language. Other ANVILL features include: LiveChat, a chat program that allows up to four participants, similar to other online video chat software; Quizzes and Surveys, a feature that allows teachers to administer tests and surveys that can be used in conjunction with Voiceboards; and TCast, ANVILL’s a newest feature, which allows teachers to easily telecast their lectures by embedding audio and video files in lessons without leaving ANVILL or having to deal with the pain of resizing and reformatting files. These ANVILL features, says Magoto, synthesize many of the tools used by language teachers in what was once called the “language lab,” which not so long ago used audio and video tapes to help students learn foreign languages.

Virtualizing the language lab

“Once a upon a time in language teaching,” says Magoto, “every school spent a lot of money on what was called the language lab.” These labs contained audio and video recorders and playback devices all for the singular purpose of aiding language instructors. In UO’s own Yamada Language Center there was a lab that contained tape players, VCRs, and TVs embedded in the lab’s 64 desks forming a kind of analog desktop computer that only did audio and video recording and playback. Built in 1991, the lab was state of the art for the time, and had the ability to broadcast from a single command station the same audio and video to all of the lab’s 64 desks. But by 1999, less than 10 years after it was completed much of the lab’s equipment was broken.

That same year Apple came out with its QuickTime streaming media server. The QuickTime server allowed large numbers of students to stream media simultaneously. “But,” says Magoto “this was just a one-way channel.” The students still couldn’t interact with the media. The widespread adoption of Adobe Flash changed all that. 

In 2003, Magoto gathered some funds and partnered with a Flash developer named Jim Duber. Magoto’s lab paid Duber to write a series of speech applications, and got UO’s Information Services to host the Flash server. The use of Flash allowed for the interactivity that QuickTime’s simple media streaming could not. It also got around a technical hurdle, bandwidth at the time wasn’t what it is now. “The other alternative [to Flash],” says Magoto, “was find a copy of Audacity [an open-source audio editing software] make your recording save it as an mp3 and in 2004, because of the limits on bandwidth you could send maybe 30 seconds of speech.”

ANVILL across the world

Originally what was to become ANVILL was integrated with UO’s Blackboard. But while integrating with Blackboard made it easy for UO users to access Magoto and Duber’s new tools, the course management system made it difficult for outside users to join in. In August 2006, after talking with a language teacher in the small Eastern Oregon town of Burns, Magoto, with the help of developers Norman Kerr, Tauno Hogue, and Martha White, decided to expand the program outside of Blackboard, placing the new speech applications inside the free and open-source content management system, Drupal.

“Once we figured out that we could support thousands of users at the university, the idea was why not do it for the entire state of Oregon?” Naming his grant proposal “Speech in Burns” for the Burns teacher he spoke with, Magoto received his initial funding from the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS). With the help of CASLS and CASLS Director Carl Falsgraf, ANVILL was officially born. The program went state-wide in 2006, nation-wide in 2007, and officially international—there were already schools in France, Italy, and Mexico using ANVILL after it went national—in 2010.

Today, Magoto estimates about 40 classes at UO use ANVILL. Around the country and around the world, Magoto estimates there are about 925 teachers using his program, teachers like Kazuko Page.

Saving language education

Page is currently using ANVILL as part of a program at Grant High School to integrate technology in the classroom. Page says she hopes ANVILL can make up for budget cuts in Portland area school funding.

“We see around this [Portland] metro area that many schools are dropping Japanese programs,” says Page. The language teacher says she hopes students whose schools no longer offer Japanese could have access to Japanese courses taught by her via ANVILL. But ANVILL could itself lose funding.

Magoto says ANVILL receives about 75 percent of its funding from CASLS, which earlier this year lost 50 percent of its own funding. “Like any grant funded project I knew this day would come,” says Magoto, “it just came sooner than I thought.” This won’t affect UO language students and instructors, says Magoto. But the missing funds could spell trouble for Page and other non-UO teachers using ANVILL.  

“Both economically and technically most of our users like the fact that it [ANVILL] is hosted at the University of Oregon,” says Magoto. “And they are not ready to run Flash servers, or large scale installations of Drupal.”

Magoto says he is currently seeking other funding sources. He says he is also looking into eventually removing Flash from ANVILL, making the program entirely open-source. Doing this, says Magoto, would cut back on the cost of the program and could make it easier for other schools to host ANVILL themselves.

See ANVILL online at anvill.uoregon.edu.