He has been teaching five classes a semester, more than a normal load for any teacher, and now he’s taking a break.

“This is one of the most wonderful things that has happened to me,” said Dr. Pedro Talavera, associate professor of communications. “And I think that the college will gain also.”

Talavera will be taking a sabbatical in the fall semester to work on a Spanish project. The project is a Spanish manual e-book which will be used for Internet Spanish classes. The e-book will be like a normal textbook, but the user is supplied with video, audio and everything else all on one CD-ROM.

Talavera said the program is mostly done, but he is going to spend his break from teaching fixing the bugs in the program. It is a hard process, he said.

“I’m a computer nerd, but I’m not a computer programmer,” he said.

He hopes the e-book will help the long distance students with their online Spanish classes.

Mike Stevenson, junior speech communications major, has used one of the CDs Talavera has in his regular class. He said it was much better than any of the other materials he has used. He said the “cheap” programs did little to help him out of the classroom.

“It didn’t even help much in Spanish I,” Stevenson said.

He said with the other programs and workbooks, a student couldn’t find out if they were doing the exercises right or wrong until class. With Talavera’s program, though, Stevenson said “the answers are there.” He received automatic feedback on everything he did.

“It was better than the software I purchased,” he said.

He described the disc as being like online exercises, reviews and tests. He thought it helped a lot as a tutorial to his in-class experience.

“I felt like I did better on the last test,” Stevenson said.

He expects the software will help people taking Spanish over the Internet.

Eventually, Talavera would also like to be able to apply the e-book to Russian classes. Dr. Tatiana Karmanova, associate professor of Russian and Spanish, is excited about the idea. She said it would “certainly help a lot with Russian.”

“While there are many commercial programs for Spanish, there are almost no Russian ones,” Karmanova said. “His e-book would be like the only electronic textbook.”

She said Talavera has been teaching Internet classes for two years, and he has worked until midnight seven days a week perfecting things.

“It’s a very labor intensive project,” she said.

While she hopes he will be able to apply the program to Russian, she said entering all the information in for the Russian program would take a long time.

She admires Talavera for his patience and hard work on the project.

“You have to feel really passionate about it to do it,” Karmanova said.

Talavera has been teaching more than the average number of classes since 1995 because of the shortage of Spanish teachers.

“I take another load because I’m a saint,” he said.

He will be one of four teachers taking a sabbatical in the fall, but he will be the only one from the communications department. He is pleased with the opportunity.

“It is always good to have an opportunity to concentrate on a project without having to deal with the everyday work of classes,” Talavera said. “It’s a good way to make an improvement to your teaching.”

Dr. Jay Moorman, head of the communications department, said Talavera has spent hours on developing online Spanish classes.

“In a way, he’s reached a whole other level with contacting students with this superior system,” Moorman said.

Talavera also hopes to be able to publish the e-book for people at other institutions to use in their long-distance classes.

When instructors take sabbaticals, they have to concentrate on a project from the College. They then have to present results one semester later.

“The College gets better teachers,” Talavera said. “They get better classes.”

Students who want to try out his program can go to the Missouri Southern Blackboard Web site and see the trial site. They can type in “new” as the username and “student” as the password.

Talavera will be returning to teach in the spring semester of 2004.