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Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

Inspiring case studies of open practices to engage teachers and students

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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.

Ecologies of Knowledge: The Role of Libraries and Librarians in the OER Movement

By Becky Thoms & Joshua J. Thoms

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Our presentation at this year’s AAAL conference highlighted several findings from a survey distributed to 155 university-level language program directors (LPDs). The study provides a snapshot of the progress of open education in the field of language learning in the United States. In one section of the survey, we asked LPDs questions about whether or not they had considered the library as a resource to support development and use of open educational resources (OER) in their foreign language (FL) programs. Seventy-three percent of respondents indicated that they had not considered the university library as a resource. This particular finding underscores the need for increased collaboration between LPDs and their institution’s library/librarians. This unique cross-disciplinary relationship will be key to the ongoing proliferation and incorporation of OER materials and tools in FL education.

University libraries are, at their very core, diverse knowledge ecosystems that provide a wide range of services and materials to the university at large. With respect to FL education, librarians can be vital partners in the process of encouraging FL faculty to incorporate OER in their courses. These information professionals excel in areas of evaluation, location, and organization, and each of these topics represents an area critical to the widespread adoption of OER. We have only scratched the surface of the potential of OER and the benefits of collaboration between librarians and the disciplines. Some interesting examples are out there: UMass Amherst Libraries; Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota); PDX Open (Portland State University); and Open Course Library (Washington Community & Technical College). However, as you see in these examples, foreign languages are underrepresented. The bright side of this is that we are at a moment of exciting opportunity and potential.

Successful libraries are always evaluating the services they provide and asking what they can do to better serve their constituents—students, faculty, and staff, and in our current environment a crucial part of the answer to that question for all of these user groups is “embrace open!” This is a common thread within the OER movement in that it is, at some level, about improving the learning experience for students. We all know about the economic reasons for embracing OER, but the benefits of OER go far beyond the economics. Open educational resources can add authenticity and vitality to the foreign language classroom and create an environment where both students and faculty are more engaged participants.

 

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Becky Thoms is the Scholarly Communication and Copyright Librarian at Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University. She manages USU’s Institutional Repository and provides education and outreach services related to intellectual property, scholarly communication, and all things open.

 

 

Joshua J. Thoms is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Applied Linguistics at Utah State University. His research interests include the role of classroom discourse in L2 learning and teaching, computer-mediated language learning, and issues related to foreign language textbooks/materials.