The system Galal Walker, professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, developed five years ago to provide more effective assessments of his students seeking employment or academic placement in China is about to “go public.”

The Advanced Language Performance Portfolio System (ALPPS) has been such an effective tool that Walker believed it could be turned into a commercial product with broader public appeal.

The Ohio Third Frontier program agreed and awarded $100,000 to the new Dublin-based ALPPS Ltd. Corporation Walker formed to facilitate the process.

“Our goal now is to produce a software product that can be applied in a more general way,” Walker said.

Walker is designer and program manager of the new system; James Liu is the engineer and project manager; and Keith Johanns is leading the commercialization of the system.

Walker began developing this tool at the beginning of the Ohio State Midwest US-China Flagship Program in 2007, which includes the Global Professional Service Corps that provides internships in China for Americans with advanced language proficiency.

The need to effectively and quickly evaluate the capabilities of students of advanced Chinese language and culture in the East Asian Languages and Literatures program was critical to their successful placement.

“We want our students to have that experience of living and working in China,” Walker said. “And we needed to find a way to quickly prove to Chinese CEO’s that our students are qualified and can do the job for them. They are not used to having foreigners in their companies and they need to be convinced that these students are actually proficient in Chinese.”

And the best way to do that is to show them.

Walker’s system does just that. Its video format allows evaluators on the other end to view students’ presentations demonstrating their skill set.

“The beauty of the system,” Walker said, is “its transparency—whatever skill someone is claiming to have, can be seen. It is also ubiquitous—an evaluator could be anywhere and go online to view the video.

“We felt this had possibilities for wide application—not just at universities, but for companies that are doing more and more international recruiting—and this is a very fast way to do it.”

Students in the program are mostly graduate students and 95% are non-heritage—meaning that most started learning Chinese as undergraduate college students.

“All have another discipline, or domain, as well, ranging from micro-economics to biochemistry,” Walker said. “When students can do an online presentation--in Chinese--about their area of expertise, be it explaining biochemical lab techniques or the intricacies of micro-financing—it is very effective.

“Our goal is to prepare Americans to work in China. We have proven that with the proper training in Chinese language and culture, Americans of all backgrounds can reach the highest level of capabilities for building successful China-related careers.”

Students compete for project-driven internships throughout China that last anywhere from a month to nearly a year. Through their internship experiences, participants learn how to become valued contributors to a China-based operation in their field of knowledge.

Walker's students have received internships in Chinese law offices, with marketing branding strategists, in television, at the China Investment & Trade Commission, and at Guizhou World Bank Cultural Heritage Preservation Project. As interns are doing real work, all internship hosts provide some form of compensation.

Walker is the director of Ohio State’s National East Asian Languages Resource Center and currently serves as president of the Midwest US-China Association, a non-partisan association that promotes economic, educational, and cultural exchanges between China and the Midwestern American states.

He was instrumental in the development and implementation of Individualized Instruction in Chinese at Ohio State and has been actively investigating the integration of media in advanced language instruction.