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Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

A New Grant and New Projects for COERLL

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COERLL is thankful to have received the Title VI language resource center grant for 2018-2022, which means we have a lot of new projects in the works. You can read a summary below, or learn more on the Projects page of our website, which has more details about the projects and who is leading them. Be sure to also check out the website for the fifteen other Title VI language resource centers.

Teaching Materials

Trayectos: A Multiliteracies Approach to Collegiate Spanish is a collection of performance-based OER for beginning and intermediate second language learners of Spanish, developed by Texas A&M faculty and graduate students using the Learning by Design approach.

Teacher development

COERLL provides teacher development through workshops and online communities, where participants’ own work is published for other teachers to use.

Texas Coalition for Heritage Spanish (TeCHS) is a platform for members to share data and pedagogical resources, collaborate on best practices, connect with community organizations, and advocate for Spanish heritage language teaching.

Games2Teach Collaboratories are interactive workshops where teachers play technology-mediated games, learn how game design principles promote language acquisition, and learn to implement games in their classrooms. Based on work by CASLS and CERCLL.

Foreign Languages & the Literary in The Everyday (FLLITE), a project with CERCLL, aids instructors in designing their own literacy-based lessons that focus on the poetics of everyday language (letters, YouTube videos, etc.).

K-12 initiatives

Juntos: The Heritage Spanish Lesson Project is a series of proficiency-based lessons related to personal life, college tasks, career readiness, and civic participation for Heritage Spanish learners in grades 6-12.

Recorridos: AP Spanish Literature Anthology is a multi-volume anthology series of Hispanic literature for AP and other advanced students. Each textbook includes reading activities and glosses, historical and cultural information, and assessments.

Less Commonly Taught Languages 

Her Şey bir Merhaba ile Başlar (Everything Begins with a Hello) is an open-source, online curriculum for Intermediate-Mid Turkish students.  Learners use language to investigate, explain and reflect on contemporary Turks’ socio-cultural practices and products.

OER for Teaching and Learning Nahuatl aims to develop 30 units of online Huasteca Nahuatl multimedia learning materials for speakers of Spanish and English.

Reality Czech: A Course in Contemporary Czech Language and Culture is an online curriculum for beginning and intermediate language students. Modules follow a sequence of pre-class, in-class, and post-class activities ideal for a flipped classroom.

Two projects will add to COERLL’s existing Portuguese materials. Brazilpod Teacher’s Guide and Lesson Index helps users integrate media from the Brazilpod website into their teaching and learning. For the intermediate course ClicaBrasil, COERLL will provide a printed textbook to accompany the online videos and readings.

COERLL also provides consultation about open pedagogical design to project teams supervised by other grant-funded entities.

Outreach and dissemination

COERLL connects to teachers through newsletters, blogs, and social media. We support teachers’ work by offering stipends for materials creation as part of the Collaborators Program, and by awarding digital badges in the Language OER Network (LOERN). At the University of Texas, COERLL and other Title VI entities will reach out to students and instructors through More Than A Skill events about language learning as an ethical act.

Research

COERLL’s main publications will be the fully-refereed online journal Language Learning & Technology, co-sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center and Center for Language & Technology (both at University of Hawai’i), and “Open Education and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching”, an openly-licensed book of case studies.

 

David Wiley’s Remix Hypothesis: using OER to rethink teaching

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David Wiley, Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning and OER advocate, spoke at the University of Texas to kick off the Year of Open, a series of events sponsored by the UT Libraries and the Center for Learning Sciences. Wiley is well known in Open Education circles for his “5 R’s” framework of OER (reuse, revise, remix, redistribute, and retain).

To get the audience to think about the broader benefits of OER, Wiley discussed his “Remix Hypothesis.” In brief, the “Remix Hypothesis” states that changes in student outcomes occurring in conjunction with OER adoption correlate positively with three faculty practices:

  • “replace” — substituting a text or a book for another
  • “realign” — finding ways to “mix and match” materials, using some open materials mixed with closed materials
  • “rethink” — thinking about what you can do with open resources that you couldn’t do before, essentially rethinking teaching methods

Replacing has the smallest impact, whereas realigning has a medium impact. The most profound impact comes from rethinking, because it’s not just about adding new materials but rather inventing new teaching practices and getting students and teachers to do things they have never done before. Details about the Remix Hypothesis can be found on Wiley’s blog, but in general, the hypothesis boils down to this: Open Educational Resources, unlike most closed materials, foster deep reflection about teaching and learning.

In one of his examples, Wiley talked about a class he taught in which students rewrote a textbook together. This required more than a simple change in textbook, it was a new way of teaching the class. As a consequence, the students had a real sense of pride in doing good work. For example, Wiley noted that his students invested more time and effort into the class because they knew others would see their work.

Another example of OER fostering a rethinking of pedagogical practice comes from Joanna Luks’ COERLL project, the open French textbook Le littéraire dans le quotidien (The Literary in the Everyday), which she uses to teach French in ways that go beyond the conventional. Joanna wanted to change her students’ habits by giving them a grading rubric and asking them to do extensive peer reviews of each other’s work before handing in their final products. By building these practices into her own OER, Joanna was able to engage her students in ways that she found lacking in commercial materials.

Most people cite cost savings and updated materials as the major benefits of OER. But according to Wiley’s “Remix Hypothesis,” the greatest promise of OER lies in helping teachers and learners to rethink their own educational practices.

5 Ways to Open Up Corpora for Language Learning

By Rachael Gilg

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Corpora developed by linguists to study languages are a promising source of authentic materials to employ in the development of OER for language learning. Recently, COERLL’s SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom project launched a new open resource that seeks to make it easy to search and adapt materials from a video corpus.

The SpinTX video archive  provides a pedagogically-friendly web interface to search hundreds of videos from the Spanish in Texas Corpus. Each of the videos is accompanied by synchronized closed captions and a transcript that has been annotated with thematic, grammatical, functional and metalinguistic information. Educators using the site can also tag videos for features that match their interests, and share favorite videos in playlists.

A collaboration among educators, professional linguists, and technologists, the SpinTX project leverages different aspects of the “openness” movement including open research, open data, open source software, and open education. It is our hope that by opening up this corpus, and by sharing the strategies and tools we used to develop it, others may be able to replicate and build on our work in other contexts.

So, how do we make a corpus open and beneficial across communities? Here are 5 ways:

1. Create an open and accessible search interface

Minimize barriers to your content. Searching the SpinTX video archive requires no registration, passwords or fees. To maximize accessibility, think about your audience’s context and needs. The SpinTX video archive offers a corpus interface specifically for educators, and plans to to create a different interface for researchers.

2. Use open content licences

Add a Creative Commons license to your corpus materials. The SpinTX video archive uses a CC BY-NC-SA license that requires attribution but allows others to reuse the materials different contexts.

3. Make your data open and share content

Allow others to easily embed or download your content and data. The SpinTX video archive provides social sharing buttons for each video, as well as providing access to the source data (tagged transcripts) through Google Fusion Tables.

4. Embrace open source development

When possible, use and build upon open source tools. The SpinTX project was developed using a combination of open source software (e.g. TreeTagger, Drupal) and open APIs (e.g. YouTube Captioning API). Custom code developed for the project is openly shared through a GitHub repository.

5. Make project documentation open

Make it easy for others to replicate and build on your work. The SpinTX team is publishing its research protocols, development processes and methodologies, and other project documentation on the SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom blog.

Openly sharing language corpora may have wide-ranging benefits for diverse communities of researchers, educators, language learners, and the public interest. The SpinTX team is interested in starting a conversation across these communities. Have you ever used a corpus before? What did you use it for? If you have never used a corpus, how do you find and use authentic videos in the classroom?  How can we make video corpora more accessible and useful for teachers and learners?

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gilgRachael Gilg is the Project Manager and Lead Developer for COERLL’s Spanish in Texas Corpus project and the SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom project. She has acted as project manager, designer, and developer on a diverse set of projects, including educational websites and online courses, video and interactive media, digital archives, and social/community websites.

COERLL @ SOCALLT

From the editor

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We had a notable presence at this year’s SOCALLT conference (South Central Association for Language Learning Technology). Language educators from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico gathered to talk all things edu-tech. So we took this opportunity to unveil some of COERLL’s new or updated open online language learning resources and get some f2f feedback.

COERLL Presentations on New or Improved OER
  • Web developer Rachael Gilg and corpus developer Arthur Wendorf gave a hands-on workshop for the new SpinTX beta release site of the Spanish in Texas corpus.
  • COERLL director Carl Blyth gave a workshop demonstrating eComma, a web application and resources for social reading — groups of users annotating the same text together. He also gave a talk on called, “The Literary in the  Everyday: An OER for Creating Literacy Activities” — priming the public for this upcoming open resource.
  • Karen Kelton and Nancy Guilloteau (of Francais interactif fame) gave a talk and demonstration of their new French OER — Enhancing French Skills.

Attendees were surprised and excited that all of our materials were open — available for the public to use, remix and share. People were curious about how we manage to create our menu of language learning resources — our answer to this is that open materials are created in community: in communities of dedicated language educators and scholars, students, technologists, programmers, web developers and end users who all have a stake in the game. Created for the people, by the people.

For those of you who were with us at SOCALLT, let us know what new idea, practice or tool you are excited about trying out in your teaching. What inspired you?

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If you’re coming to the IALLT conference in June, please come see us at our SpinTX and eComma presentations. And we’ll be in Hawaii at the CALICO conference, so come by our booth and check out our presentations!

 

Language Knowmads Wanted

From the editor

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We found a kindred thinker in education futurologist, John Moravec at the University of Minnesota — take a look at his vision for Society 3.0 (that’s us!). Moravec describes members of Society 3.0 as agents of:

  • change
  • globalization
  • innovation fueled by knowmads (“nomadic knowledge workers”)

Sound familiar? A key aspect of Society 3.0 involves online open access, crowd sourcing that promotes sharing, remixing, and capitalizing on new ideas. We know that much of this happens through online communities — where knowmads gather in virtual spaces to push ideas into reality.

Pages from COERLL-Newsletter-Spring-2013In COERLL’s Spring 2013 newsletter, we share what we’re doing to nurture Society 3.0’s language communities.

First, we’re launching eComma, a web application and resources for social reading — where groups of users annotate the same text together.

Also, COERLL’s SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom Project aims to create a self-sustaining community of linguists, technologists, and Spanish language educations collaborating on a video-based website for teaching Spanish.

And check out the facebook language communities we moderate: COERLL, Francais interactif, Deutisch im Blick, Brazilpod, Spanish in Texas.

Finally, this. Us. Here. At Open Up, we want to connect with other language learning  knowmads looking for ways to accelerate change toward open education. So please get in touch with us with your ideas for sharing, remixing, and capitalizing on open language resources. Join the conversation!

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For more about fostering language learning communities, see MOOCs + Learning Networks = The Mixxer by Todd Bryant.