Languages Consortium

Welcome to the SUNY Comprehensive Colleges Languages Consortium web site. Our goal is to make it easy for students at SUNY’s Comprehensive Colleges to study language beyond what is available at their home institution, both by increasing the number of languages available and the number of courses in a language, at no additional cost to students. We make use of SUNY cross registration to help students sign up for a fully online course at another institution and SUNY Online to search available courses. Course content and online pedagogy are approved by the campus providing the course.

Students must be full time at one of the following twelve comprehensive college, and planning to take the course in a fall or spring semester, to take advantage of a language course at another institution via the Languages Consortium. In summer and intersession, a student incurs additional tuition. The twelve comprehensive colleges participating are Brockport, Buffalo State, Cortland, Empire State, Fredonia, Geneseo, Old Westbury, Oneonta, Oswego, Plattsburgh, Potsdam, and Purchase. Students at other SUNY schools still be able to participate via cross registration; please look at your insitution’s cross registration policy. Similarly, courses offered by other SUNY schools my be available to you outside of the Language Consortium agreement, if allowed by your institution’s existing cross registration policy.
Search Courses

  • Students

    To take advantage of the Languages Consortium, a student must: 

    • Be enrolled full time at a SUNY comprehensive college
    • Identify the course they wish to take using the search tool above (please note that not all language courses and not all SUNY schools are part of the Languages Consortium; courses that are available are identified individually)
    • Obtain approval from the language department chair on their home campus (see Campus Contacts)
    • Cross register for the chosen course, with the help of the languages chair
    • Adhere to the policies of the host campus, including for start and end dates to the term that may be different from the student’s home campus

  • Faculty and Campuses

    The thirteen SUNY comprehensive colleges have developed the languages consortium policies and are piloting the course sharing via SUNY Online, using cross registration (see Governance for details). Students may take an approved online language course at any of the other comprehensive colleges, using cross registration, without costing the student anything, and without tuition dollars moving with the student. As compensation, the receiving campus counts the increase in enrollment.

    Language chairs must approve any student enrolling via the consortium to ensure the course:

    • is not offered on the student’s home campus that semester, and 
    • will satisfy any local requirement the student is seeking to fulfill, whether for gen ed, a major, or a minor.

    Campuses are encouraged to offer online language courses through the consortium. To list a course, it must be: 

    • fully online, but may contain synchronous elements
    • approved for online delivery
    • taught 90% or more in the target language
    • submitted to SUNY Online via your campus distance learning contact. DL contacts regularly submit course files to the SUNY Online course navigator using a spreadsheet. The last column in the spreadsheet (after Delivery Method) should be labeled cat_id. If the course has been reviewed by the SUNY Languages Consortium, a “3” is entered in the cat_id column. (See example)

    For full policies about the languages consortium pilot see Course Eligibility.