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What Rebus can do for Language Teachers

January 31, 2020

The open education movement is full of well-meaning, very smart people who get stuff done. My favourite kind of people! These people care about students, their success, and, most-importantly, their well-being. There are lots of ways to participate in this movement: you can adopt open educational resources (OER) in your classrooms, contribute to a project in a small way, peer review an open textbook, adapt a project, create a textbook from scratch, or become an open ambassador. It’s Rebus Community’s goal to support faculty, librarians, and other open practitioners as they create, adapt, discuss, contribute, and share open textbooks.

Rebus Community is an initiative of the Rebus Foundation, a Canadian registered charity based in Montreal. In 2016, we put out our first call for pilot project teams who wanted to create open textbooks with the Rebus team providing project management support. Since then we’ve collaborated on dozens of open textbook projects in a range of disciplines. Through our experience and in collaboration with a big beautiful community of OER nerds, we developed a publishing model that is based on open principles and can be replicated by anyone with the drive to create impactful, accessible, high-quality textbooks. Today, we advocate for this model of publishing by providing training, software and resources that support OER creators.

Here’s what we offer:

  • The Textbook Success Program combines a twelve-week course and nine months of monthly check-ins. Participants are grouped into a cohort of creators from their campus and from other institutions. The result: hands-on experience with open publishing, the capacity to create more open textbooks, and a network of OER-practitioners that crosses disciplines, institutions, and countries.
  • The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) is the openly licensed documentation of our collaborative publishing model. It guides readers through the process of creating open textbooks, starting with team building, moving through peer review, and finishing with post-release considerations.
  • Our web-based software lets anyone create a project homepage for their open textbook project. The project homepage is public facing and can be used to amplify your project’s status updates, calls for participation, and eventual release announcement. Users can hold discussions on a wide array of topics, organize important resources, and connect with their team.

To date, we’ve had a number of projects concerned with language learning. I’m particularly excited about the Technology in Language Teaching team. They’re participating in the Textbook Success Program with an open textbook project that provides, “an overview of the theory and practice of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) for classroom and learn ‘anytime anywhere’ environments.”

In a meeting the other day, a colleague who once worked as a writing teacher said of language instructors, “They’re the first to break the rules and want to shift the normal practices of teaching.” As someone who works for an organization that supports alternatives to commercial textbook publishing, I hope what my colleague says is true. As I watch the language learning projects on Rebus Community grow, I am heartened. Let’s break rules!

—

Leigh Kinch-Pedrosa does marketing and communications for the Rebus Foundation in Montreal, Canada. Before joining the Rebus team, Leigh produced live storytelling shows and art installations, and developed a series of workshops that encourage entrepreneurs and academics to use personal storytelling to communicate complex ideas.

Filed Under: OER initiatives, Publishing OER Tagged With: adapt, CALL, collaborate, OER, open, Rebus, Textbook

Announcing a new textbook: ClicaBrasil!

September 15, 2019

Editor’s note: the below post is the introduction by Vivian Flanzer to the ClicaBrasil textbook that she recently published with COERLL. The introduction carries a CC BY-NC-SA license.  

ClicaBrasil, the web-based Portuguese program developed and in use at the University of Texas at Austin since 2010, is a media-rich Open Educational Resource (OER), which requires neither password nor fees. An OER is distinguished from commercial materials by its open copyright license (Creative Commons license). Users may adapt the original materials and share their adaptations with others, but must credit the original content and its author.

ClicaBrasil was designed to teach the Portuguese language in the context of Brazilian culture to intermediate and advanced language learners. It can be successfully used either in classroom settings or for autonomous learning. The website and the new textbook comprise an open curriculum that includes seven units based on culturally rich literary texts. In addition, the curriculum contains 157 authentic and unscripted videos of Brazilians from all regions and sectors of society speaking about their lives, their country, and topics that arise from these readings. Each unit contains hundreds of activities that hone language skills while raising awareness about contemporary Brazilian society. The activities are accompanied by a helpful answer-key. ClicaBrasil also provides a grammar bank with concise explanations about verb tenses and conjugations as well as a vocabulary list for each chapter. Designed to accompany the website, the ClicaBrasil textbook is downloadable for free in PDF format and is also available for purchase as a print-on-demand book from Amazon and Lulu.com.

Tips for the Learner

Each unit has four sections with many activities: Pano de fundo (Backdrop), where you will be introduced to the unit’s specific socio-cultural scenario; Leitura (Reading), with glossaries and tools to help you understand the text; Gramática (Grammar), where you will learn and review grammar topics in the context of the readings and the videos; and Aproximando o foco (Zooming in), where you will have the opportunity to explore and reflect more extensively about aspects of Brazilian culture and society that arise in the units.

Tips for the Instructor

There are several ways to use ClicaBrasil. I encourage you to personalize these open materials according to your students’ needs. As this is an OER, you can edit and remix its content, crediting the original source and author. Feel free to skip a unit or a section, or to do them in a different order. And if, for example, you think a composition activity would make more sense in your course as a class discussion, go for it! It is always a good idea to select which activities you will do in class (as a group, in pairs, or individually) and which you will assign for homework. I suggest you ask your students to check the answer-key before submitting their homework, so they can clear up any questions in class. Some activities offer “suggested answers” because they reflect personal views or subjective opinions. My students have reported that the “suggested answers” have inspired them to discuss the lessons in class after doing the homework.

I have had a lot of fun reinventing the way I teach with ClicaBrasil. I hope you will too.

For more information:

  • Access the ClicaBrasil website
  • Download a PDF of the book (FREE!)
  • Purchase a printed copy from Amazon or Lulu

—

Vivian Flanzer Vivian Flanzer was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she spent most of her life. She coordinates the Portuguese Language Program at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of the University of Texas at Austin since 2001. She has a B.A. in Communications; an M.A. in Anthropology from the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; an M.A. in Foreign Language Education from UT-Austin; and is completing her Ph.D. in Iberian and Latin American Languages and Cultures at UT-Austin.

Filed Under: COERLL updates, Instructional Materials Tagged With: adapt, advanced, Amazon. Lulu, authentic videos, Brazil, ClicaBrasil, Creative Commons, culture, curriculum, grammar bank, intermediate, media, print-on-demand, reading, socio-cultural, Texas, Textbook, UT Austin, Vivian Flanzer, vocabulary, website

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