Open Up

Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

Looking Back on Four Years of COERLL Projects

COERLL’s 2014-2018 Title VI national foreign language resource center federal grant, and the projects funded by the grant, will soon be coming to an end.

COERLL and the project teams have learned a lot during this grant about the potential and the challenges of open educational resources. Each project had slightly different goals and a different way of reaching those goals. For every idea you see implemented in these materials, there is another great idea that we just didn’t have time for… but we hope to work on more of these in the future. And perhaps our reflections on these projects can provide some guidance or inspiration for those of you who may be considering creating your own open educational resources.

You can read about each of our projects by clicking the links below. Each of the projects was managed by faculty, created through faculty and graduate student labor, and supported by technical, graphic design, pedagogical, and administrative assistance from COERLL and other centers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Thank you to all of the project teams! It has been wonderful working with you and we are proud to help share your work.

A network to showcase OER for language learning

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Editors note: This post was originally published on the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources blog

The Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) just launched the Language OER Network (LOERN), a page on our website to list language educators who are creating, using, or promoting open educational resources (OER). Every person featured on the page receives an open digital badge from COERLL. In this effort to acknowledge, validate, inspire, and connect open practitioners, we have already distributed badges to 41 teachers, librarians, and administrators.

We built the Language OER Network because we realized that more people than ever have started to understand what we do and are interested in getting involved in their own open projects. We are always thankful to hear from K-12 teachers and community college and university faculty who spend the extra time and energy to find the right open materials to support their students’ language proficiency. The Language OER Network exists to acknowledge this work.

Even though the open movement is gaining momentum, a large number of teachers and administrators either don’t know or misunderstand what OER is. Teachers who do advocate for openness often report that they are doing it alone. Badges provide teachers with proof of their accomplishments, to validate to their colleagues and employers that using and making OER is scholarly, creative work.

Language teachers (plus other staff, administrators, or students involved in OER for languages) can earn as many as six badges on the Language OER Network, for being either an OER Teacher, OER Master Teacher, OER Creator, OER Master Creator, OER Reviewer, or OER Ambassador. From what we’ve seen, this follows the natural progression that many people take, from the basic use of supplementary OER, to the full involvement of sharing the benefits of OER with others. We hope that this set of badges will inspire people to keep opening up, eventually earning all six badges.

We would also love if people embarking on new open projects could look at this page and find others who have similar ideas, to connect with them and potentially collaborate. With the number of people pursuing OER right now, it’s likely that many of them are doing similar projects and could benefit from sharing ideas and resources.

Even though we are publishing the Language OER Network to benefit teachers, it benefits COERLL as well. LOERN will be a tapestry of open language education that will help us demonstrate what this multifaceted movement is all about. Since launching the page in the past month, we are excited to have already learned about new people and projects from across the country. We look forward to hearing from more open educators, and also hope that in the future we can find a way to acknowledge more types of open educational practices, which are just as important as open resources, but harder to quantify.

Read about your colleagues and their open projects, and join the community! https://community.coerll.utexas.edu/

A Program for Professional Growth Based on Collaboration

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Over the past three years, COERLL has been working on several projects that require participation from language instructors; a new realm for a language center accustomed to making language learning materials with small teams of faculty and graduate students.

In order to jumpstart these participatory projects, we started a “COERLL Collaborators” program to mentor teachers and give visibility (and some funding) to their work, while spreading the use of open licenses and starting a network for our projects. Participants in the COERLL Collaborators program have helped COERLL tremendously over the past year or so, by testing and providing insights into our projects.

We piloted COERLL Collaborators for FLLITE (Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday), a project with CERCLL (Center for Educational Resources in Culture Language and Literacy) in which teachers write multiliteracies lessons around an authentic resource, receive peer review feedback, and have their lesson published on fllite.org. The FLLITE team chose three graduate students to go through this process, based on lesson proposals they submitted.

These lessons are now published on the project website for anyone to use, and exemplify how a teacher can transform their interests into a completely original lesson.

  • Natasha César-Suárez photographed an image from Spain’s 15-M movement and turned it into a lesson on language in social movements.
  • Marcelo Fuentes developed an image of a letter to God found in a Chilean church into a cultural lesson and letter writing activity.
  • Carol Ready used a poem by Pablo Neruda to teach students about the impact of commercial food production on Latin America through the study of descriptive language.

For our digital badging partnership with Austin Independent School District, which awards teachers digital badges for professional development based on the TELL (Teacher Effectiveness for Language Learning) Framework, we chose three more Collaborators. The three teachers agreed to attend professional development and personal mentorship sessions organized by Thymai Dong, AISD’s World Languages Coordinator, and to earn digital badges related to the topics of the sessions.

Unfortunately administrative changes stopped us from seeing this process through to the end, but the COERLL Collaborators still received some mentorship and challenged themselves to take risks and reflect on their teaching.

  • Rachel Preston developed her own professional growth plan based on a self-assessment of her teaching, which led to an increase in her students’ self-assessment, reflection and goal-setting.
  • Tania Shebaro got motivated at a workshop to scrap her lesson plans for the next day and rewrite everything, leading to engaging and participatory class sessions.
  • Janeth Medrano attended every professional development event possible to get new resources and tools she could adapt for her students.

Thank you to all six of our Collaborators – they have taught us, in addition to teaching their students!

Six more COERLL Collaborators are now busy perfecting some new FLLITE lessons in Spanish, Portuguese, Persian, and German, and we are narrowing down COERLL Collaborators applications for our Heritage Spanish project. We are looking forward to expanding the COERLL Collaborators program and building up a network of creative and collaborative language instructors.

See what the COERLL Collaborators have created:

The Rise of Badges

From the editor

Open Up will be taking a short break, but you can expect to hear about exciting events and new OER offerings from us in the fall. This year, our focus will be on the progress of digital badges for alternative credentials in foreign language education.

Digital badges allow language educators to earn credentials for the 21st century classroom and share them with the world. Here’s a quick intro:

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We’ll be creating a badge opportunity for you at this year’s ACTFL conference, so be sure to participate and see how you can get involved in this growing movement.

Building Community at AATSP

By Carl Blyth

Conferences are a great place to talk to teachers and hear what’s on their minds.  The Spanish and Portuguese teachers at the AATSP conference in San Antonio gave us lots of terrific ideas. Here are a few:

Ann Mar, a high school AP Spanish teacher from San Antonio, told us that she had recently become aware of COERLL’s SpinTX Video Archive.  She was excited to discover that it  closely aligns with the new AP Spanish curriculum scheduled to begin this fall.  The AP Spanish Language and Culture Course is a national curriculum set by the College Board. Ann told us that there are 6 themes within the new curriculum  that match up well with the themes in the SpinTX videos ( e.g. “Personal and Public Identities”, “Families and Communities”,  “Contemporary Life”).

Ann has already posted a link to SpinTX in the AP teacher community forum. She will also be running a summer institute for AP Spanish teachers at UT Austin later in July. Finally, she is  interested in having her high school students in San Antonio collect videos using our protocols, with the idea that we could use them as part of the corpus if they turn out well.  So, it looks like COERLL will definitely be exploring how to  connect our video archive to the AP Spanish curriculum with Ann’s help.  Thanks, Ann!

Another terrific idea came from  Dr. Margo Milleret from the Portuguese program at the University of New Mexico. Margo suggested that COERLL consider developing badges aimed at middle or high school students based on our introductory LCTL resources. Badges are a way to recognize and verify online learning. The goal would be to expose students to languages that aren’t normally offered in high schools (such as Portuguese), so that when the students go to college, they would be more likely to study a LCTL.  She noted that while she doesn’t have the resources to do something like this herself, she would really like to collaborate with a center like COERLL and other  K-12 teachers to make it happen.  Margo’s great idea combines various elements of COERLL’s mission:  K-12, LCTLs, and Open Education.

And finally, another good idea came from ACTFL president Toni Theisen. Toni was chatting with us at the COERLL booth about the tremendous potential of badges for teacher development.  She wondered whether COERLL could help ACTFL award attendees of this year’s convention in Orlando with a participation badge.  Great idea, Toni! That would certainly help bring badges to the attention of the foreign language teaching community.  Let’s work on this … together.

Open Education is fundamentally about sharing.  So a big “Thank You” to all the teachers who shared their  ideas with us at AATSP.

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Carl BlythCarl Blyth is Director of COERLL and Associate Professor of French, UT Austin.  His research includes CMC,  cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, and pedagogical grammar.  He is project director of eComma, an open-source annotation application to facilitate more “social” forms of reading.