COERLL is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a four-year Title VI grant by the Department of Education to continue its operation through 2018. Established in 2010, COERLL is one of 16 national foreign language resource centers. COERLL’s mission is to produce and disseminate Open Educational Resources (OERs) for the Internet public (e.g., online language courses, reference grammars, assessment tools, corpora, etc.). The term OER refers to any educational material offered freely for anyone to use, typically involving some permission to re-mix, improve, and redistribute. Open Education is part of the Free Culture Movement, whose goal is to promote the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of open content by using the Internet and various forms of media. COERLL’s OER carry Creative Commons open licenses, a legal alternative to traditional copyright.

The $750,000 grant will allow COERLL to develop and disseminate OER in several languages such as Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Czech, French, K’ichee’ Mayan, Persian, Portuguese, and Turkish. As part of the grant, COERLL will join forces with UT-Pan American to develop OER for heritage Spanish speakers. COERLL also plans to develop a professional development badge system for foreign language teachers based on the popular TELL Project. Finally, COERLL’s research agenda will focus on determining the impact of OER on language learning and teaching in an increasingly connected world.

More information about our new projects will be coming to the COERLL website soon!