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Welcome to Open Education Week 2021

February 28, 2021 Leave a Comment

March 1-5, 2021 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 OLRC’s and COERLL’s FL OER Conference

The Open Language Resource Center (OLRC) at the University of Kansas and COERLL will be hosting the first annual Foreign Language OER Conference on Saturday, March 6, 2021. Language instructors will showcase large-scale foreign language OER and exchange information on topics related to OER production and adoption. We hope this will be a space for sharing lessons learned and building a community of practice!

There is no cost to attend the conference. It will be conducted entirely through Zoom and composed of 15 minute lightning talks and 30 minute presentations.

  • Register by March 4, 2021
  • Browse the program

Read NEW OER from COERLL

  • Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar! (Everything Begins with a Hello!), a multimedia textbook with supplementary materials for intermediate Turkish language learners, developed by Jeannette Okur and licensed under a CC BY-SA license.
  • Open Education and Second Language Learning and Teaching: The Rise of a New Knowledge Ecology, a compilation of case studies about open projects and practices in the language classroom and beyond the classroom, edited by Carl Blyth and Joshua Thoms and licensed under a CC BY-ND license.

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! 117 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:

  • Presentation Engaging Students as OER Contributors – March 1, 2021 at 10am CST
  • Webinar Equity and Open Education Faculty Panel – March 1, 2021 at 12pm CST
  • Webinar Implementación de un curso en México y Chile para la producción de REA – March 2, 2021 at 3pm CST
  • Workshop Create interactive H5P elements for your course! – March 3, 2021 at 1pm CST
  • Session Open-inspired Midday Yoga – March 4, 2021 at 1pm CST

And check out these resources:

  • 10 minute challenges to learn more about OER from BCcampus
  • Creative Commons license training content from Creative Commons
  • #OEWeek hashtag on Twitter
  • Faculty Spotlight of Dr. Jocelly Meiners, Texas Coalition for Heritage Spanish Project co-director, from University of Texas at Austin Libraries

Learn more about OER for language learning in our introductory guide

Two years ago, 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 your resource 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.

Filed Under: COERLL updates, OER initiatives, Teacher Development Tagged With: case studies, conference, OEP, OER, open educational practices, open educational resources, Turkish

Inspiring case studies of open practices to engage teachers and students

August 18, 2019 Leave a Comment

Editor’s note: the below post is the forward by Carl S. Blyth, COERLL director, to the recently published book New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom, edited by Anna Comas-Quinn, Ana Beaven, Barbara Sawhill. The forward carries a CC BY license.  

Today, in the field of foreign language teaching, there is much talk of shifting paradigms. The term paradigm was popularized by the American physicist Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to Kuhn, scientific progress is neither linear nor continuous, but rather subject to abrupt shifts in the consensus of a scientific community. To illustrate this phenomenon, Kuhn cites the well-known shift in astronomy from geocentrism (the belief that the sun and the planets revolve around the Earth) to heliocentrism (the belief that the Earth and the planets revolve around the sun). Kuhn stresses that paradigms are defined by contrasting concepts and discourses and, as a result, are largely incommensurable. Kuhn also notes that paradigm shifts are not only a matter of accepting new facts, but of reorganizing those facts into a new worldview. In other words, paradigm shifts entail objective as well as subjective change.

Despite examples of revolutionary change in the sciences, paradigm shifts in the humanities – such as in foreign language education – appear to be more gradual. Most foreign language educators integrate new ideas into their curricular and pedagogical practices in an incremental process of professional development. Personally, I believe that paradigm change in foreign language teaching is largely a matter of educators learning by example from each other. Simply put, there is nothing more powerful than a case study for catalyzing change in our field. And in this book, New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom, foreign language specialists share their stories of personal and professional transformation in the well-known form of a case study. Following the same format, each case study provides the reader with the necessary information to understand and to implement a specific pedagogical or curricular innovation. For example, each case study includes a detailed description of a new project, the intended student outcomes, as well as the tools and resources used in the project.

While many case studies focus on the use of ready-made Open Educational Resources (OERs), others describe how to integrate Open Educational Practices (OEPs) into foreign language classes. Several case studies explain how to implement principles of open pedagogy such as the creation of a Wikipedia page or a translation of a TED Talk by the students themselves. In such cases, students are challenged to follow the editorial guidelines of Wikipedia and TED for the creation of open content. Thus, in the open language classroom, students share their knowledge with the world while, at the same time, improving their proficiency in the target language. In short, each case study described in this book is a beautiful illustration of the creative commons in action. I sincerely hope that foreign language educators who read these case studies will embrace the affordances of openness for themselves and their students and thereby shift the paradigm one classroom at a time.

For an open world.

  • Read the book New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom
  • Read the case study “Creating and implementing open educational resources for the Spanish as a Heritage Language classroom” by Evelyn Durán Urrea and Jocelly G. Meiners, which discusses the Heritage Spanish website maintained by COERLL, and the OER featured there
  • Read the case study “An inclusionary open access textbook for Portuguese” by Carlos Pio, Eduardo Viana da Silva, which discusses the inclusive Portuguese textbook they are authoring, which integrates some content from Orlando Kelm and COERLL’s Brazilpod materials

Filed Under: Methods/Open educational practices (OEP), OER Research Tagged With: ana beaven, anna comas-quinn, barbara sawhill, case studies, classroom, digital literacy, heritage Spanish, inclusive, innovation, Italian, MOOC, OEP, OER, openness, outcomes, paradigm, professional development, reading, research, Spanish heritage language, TED, translation, Twitter, virtual reality, wikipedia

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