The World Studies Media Center (WSMC) at Virginia Commonwealth University strives to be a leader in the use of instructional media and information technology for the teaching and learning of foreign languages, anthropology, cultural studies and religious studies. The overarching mission of the WSMC is to harness technology to make our students' learning experiences more engaged, dynamic and interactive.

The School of World Studies recognizes that technology is an important intervention in the teaching and learning of language and culture. Social media and the Internet continue to change the landscape of education and we strive to understand how both can be used to improve the teaching and learning of other languages and cultures. The WSMC employs various strategies to improve the teaching and learning of world languages and cultures at VCU by:

• Providing faculty and students with the best, most current learning materials available.

• Providing faculty and students with state-of-the-art facilities and equipment.

• Ensuring that faculty and students have easy access to WSMC resources.

• Supporting language instructors with opportunities to learn of new developments in the fields of instructional media and educational technology.

• Supporting SWS research and its dissemination on the World Wide Web, at professional conferences, and in scholarly journals.

• Creating opportunities that allow our teachers and students to interact with native speakers of the target language - at VCU and at international partner schools.
  
  
• Staying abreast of innovative instructional tools and practices in all of the SWS fields and being vigilant of potentially disruptive technologies. This is an essential part of the WSMC's own quest for distinction.

An integral part of the WSMC mission is to engage and motivate SWS teachers and students to be active, not only in their own instructional processes, but also in that of their colleagues and classmates, at VCU and at international partner schools.

The WSMC provides a welcoming environment where virtual and traditional learning communities can come together, across divides, to achieve success in learning a foreign language and in understanding the theoretical and practical developments in language pedagogy, teaching methods, language acquisition, instructional media, international cooperation, research, assessment, and productivity.