Language Center: range of courses for autumn semester now online
The Language Center of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich has published its range of courses for the 2018 autumn semester. To help ensure regular course attendance, fees have now been introduced for students.
The courses offered by the Language Center, which include German as a foreign language, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and 15 other languages, are very popular – some courses are fully booked after just a few days. However, some students eventually stop attending their courses. These free spots cannot be filled during the semester and therefore remain vacant.
While staff and doctoral students, for example, are already required to pay course fees, these courses were previously available to other students for free. To ensure that these students are more committed to attending courses, the university administration passed a decision effective 1 August 2018 to also charge Bachelor’s, Master’s and exchange students course fees of CHF 80 per semester-long course. Courses that are part of a certain study programme’s fixed set of requirements will still be offered at no additional fee.
The new fees are merely a contribution to the course costs: they cover one sixth of the costs for a language course covering two hours a week. The language courses offered by the Language Center of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich are still inexpensive compared to other universities. Nothing will change for other course participants who were previously already paying fees.
For doctoral students, MAS students, staff and alumni, course registration starts on 3 September; for students it starts on 10 September. The registration deadline for everyone is 21 September.