Miami-Dade Community College´s English as a Second Language (ESL)Department at the Kendall campus has been awarded $500,000 from the U.S. Department of Education´s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). This grant will enable faculty to create an innovative, online writing program for ESL students on campus and in the community. The project will be called eWriting: ESL Writing Success.
M-DCC is confident the program will help students because having added lab components to its present writing courses has already improved students’ academic performance. The new eWriting program will allow ESL writers to improve their skills and scores with the accessibility and convenience of being able to practice any place with access to the Internet.
One of the benefits of the project’s design is that once it has been successful on the Kendall campus, its results can be compared with those obtained from a full, College-wide implementation. After such a wide-reaching, multi-campus application, the program can be readily adapted by other learning institutions across the country.
The ESL program at M-DCC enrolls over 12,000 students per year, making it the largest of its kind in the U.S. The team assembling the eWriting project at Kendall includes Endowed Teaching Chair recipients, published authors, professors who have taught ESL here for over 20 years, international language consultants, teacher trainers, software designers, grant directors, online course developers, and more.
Miami-Dade Community College prides itself on a rich history of developing and implementing educational innovations to meet the ever-changing needs of the students, communities, and businesses it serves.