Welcome to Open Education Week 2020

March 2-6, 2020 is Open Education Week, an international event to build awareness of open education and show its impact on teaching and learning. Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness.* Read below to learn how to get involved during Open Ed Week.

Attend COERLL’s Open Ed Week OER Hangout Webinar

Celebrate Open Education Week by attending this discussion-based webinar on Wednesday March 4 at 6:00pm CST, where you will have a chance to chat with three instructors who have adopted OER and creatively adapted the content for their language classes.

• Alexandra Gouirand is a French faculty member at South Puget Sound Community College. She uses Français interactif as the main textbook in her French 1 class, as well as ancillary books and online resources including YouTube videos.
• Dawn Michael has been teaching French since 1991, and is currently a high school French teacher in Ohio. She uses the open curriculum Français interactif to teach blended French 1 and 2 courses and creates her own supplements to accompany the resources.
• Valérie Morgan is a French lecturer. She uses the open curriculum Français interactif to teach Levels 1, 2, and 3 French. To supplement the textbook she uses Google Classroom, Google Tools, Flipgrid, and Padlet.

Since Français interactif is the most widely-used OER published by COERLL, it was easier for us to find French teachers to present here, but we hope teachers of all languages will join.

There will be 20 minutes of presentation time, and the rest of the hour will be dedicated to your questions and to conversation between participants and panelists. We want to hear from you!

Be featured on COERLL’s Language OER Network

Have you taught with openly licensed resources, created your own openly licensed resources, or helped others learn about OER? If so, we want to give you a digital badge and feature you on the Language OER Network! 102 faculty, teachers, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students are already listed there.

Visit the LOERN page to join

Find other events and resources for Open Education Week

You can discover other events around the world on the Open Education Week website. Here’s just a sample:

• Online Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Honouring Indigenous Writers Wikipedia Edit-a-thon – March 2 at 3:00pm CST
• Twitter chat #OERWishList: A Twitter Chat for the Future of Open Education – March 3 at 1:30pm CST
• COERLL Webinar Talk to teachers who have adopted and adapted OER – March 4 at 6:00pm CST
• Webinar Libretexts and H5P: How We Created a Spanish OER Grammar Manual – March 4 at 6:00pm CST
• Webinar H5P for Assessment – March 5 at 1:00pm
• Webinar Language Diversity in OER with Pressbooks – March 5 at 2:00pm

And check out these resources:

• Follow the #OEWeekChallenge hashtag from Open Oregon for an OER-related challenge to do each day
• Read about Julie Ward’s student-authored anthology project Antología abierta de literatura hispana

Learn more about OER for language learning in our introductory guide

Last year, we launched the Introduction to OER for Language Teachers, a series of modules on topics related to creating and using open educational resources and practices. We have been updating the guide ever since based on our conversations with teachers – it’s OER, so it continues to evolve!

If you are already a user or creator of OER, or are planning on becoming one, please take a look at the guide, and let us know what you think!

Try licensing your work

If you are already sharing activities, lesson plans, or other resources with colleagues, you might want to consider adding a Creative Commons license, so people know how they are allowed to use it and remember to give you credit. Here’s how…

1. Somewhere in your document, write “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License” (or whichever other license you choose). This page can help you choose a license (that is, choose how people are allowed to use your resource).
2. Add an image of the license if you have it.
3. Don’t forget to include your name as the author!

*Definition from the Open Education Consortium’s Open Education Week website, licensed under CC BY.