Experiences and evaluation of a blended learning concept for learning Chinese in higher education

The open-source learning management system ILIAS has gained widespread popularity in educational institutions across Europe. At the University of Passau it was used in a two-year project for implementing a Chinese language learning course. Chinese is a difficult foreign language for German speakers to grasp. There are many distinct difficulties, which we aim to overcome with our Chinese course. This article will describe the development process and our experience in using and adopting ILIAS for learning Chinese, and the evaluation of the blended learning course. The paper shows evaluation results and experiments conducted during and after the project Chinese for the Workplace. Generally they are based on questionnaires and interviews to identify problems and benefits of the Chinese course.