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Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

Welcome to Open Education Week 2021

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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.

Read NEW OER from COERLL

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:

And check out these resources:

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.

Get to know the Open Language Resource Center!

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Nearly 700 miles north of COERLL, you will find the Open Language Resource Center (OLRC). The OLRC, located at the University of Kansas, shares COERLL’s focus on the creation and promotion of Open Educational Resources and is likewise a National Foreign Language Resource Center. Founded in 2018, the OLRC sponsors projects that strike a careful balance between breadth of audience and degree of need, prioritizing OER that are of a scale to replace or significantly supplement commercial curricula. Current projects include:

Chinese

Ting Yi Ting: Listening Makes Perfect is an online guide that enables learners to hear and identify phonemic categories in Mandarin, including lexical tones, in a variety of phonetic contexts and to associate those phonemes with correct Pinyin orthography.

French

Le pont is a complete curriculum that provides a bridge to help students who are transitioning from intermediate to advanced proficiency. Chapters 1-3 are available as PDF downloads with chapters 4-8 forthcoming.

German

Incorporating Corpora is an online manual on the use of corpora to teach German to English-speaking learners, providing one of the few corpora manuals for instructors of languages other than English.

Kiswahili

Hujambo! is a first-year Kiswahili textbook that chronicles the adventures of two American students studying abroad in Tanzania. Chapters of this textbook will be released in a serialized fashion with the first half of the book released this summer.

Russian

Russian Aspect in Conversation is an online, modular manual to perfecting the aspectual category of Russian verbs by training the learner to focus on understanding and interpreting aspectual usage. Work on this project began Fall of 2020 with the first modules to be released later this year.

Spanish

Acceso is an online curriculum for intermediate-level learners of Spanish that can be adopted as a complete curriculum or as a supplement to an existing curriculum.

Turkish

Konuşan Paragraflar (Talking Paragraphs) is a complete curriculum aimed at helping English-speaking learners of Turkish move from the intermediate to advanced level. Chapters of this textbook will be released in a serialized fashion with the first half of the book released this summer.

Ukrainian

Dobra forma provides an online, modular overview of Ukrainian grammar with contextualized activities that enable students to internalize correct grammatical forms as they focus on the communication of meaning.

If you are looking for additional foreign language OER materials or are interested in creating your own, COERLL and OLRC invite you to register for their upcoming Foreign Language OER Conference at the end of Open Education Week on Saturday March 6th. Attendance is free but registration is required!

Investigating the Effects of OER on Foreign Language Learning and Teaching at AAAL

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This weekend, the 2014 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference begins in beautiful Portland, OR. Center Director Carl Blyth will co-host a panel with Joshua Thoms of Utah State University, which will focus on Open Educational Resources in the Foreign Language context. Steven Thorne of Portland State University, Fernando Rubio of the University of Utah, and Amy Rossomondo from the University of Kansas will join in on the panel presentations and offer up perspectives about the affordances of openness, the benefits and challenges of using OER in foreign language programs, and even demonstrate comparisons of student interactions in technology enhanced language learning MOOCs.

The “unofficial motto” of the 2014 AAAL Conference is “change.” And, while much of that motto reflects a shifting of the conference format, it seems to be a particularly relevant theme to frame not only the larger exploration of the role of OER in foreign language education, but also the conversation about investigating the effect of OER in foreign language teaching and learning. OER is often seen as something of a disruptive technology in the context of education; the perception of its value and potential impact varies widely among faculty, administrators, and students. While understanding these impressions certainly plays an important part in assessing the value of OER and learning more about its function in various educational contexts, there is an equally important role for an evidence-based approach to both shore up and dismantle particular claims.  

COERLL-Newsletter-Spring-2014_thumbnail-medium copy

Here at COERLL, we just wrapped up the spring issue of our bi-annual newsletter entitled “Research for an Open World.” In it, we focus on the idea that organizations like COERLL have a real opportunity to advance a research agenda by taking advantage of various data capture and analytics tools available to us – like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. While the software largely provide demographic data and lend insight on general characteristics of the users of particular online resources we make available, we know that unpacking and analyzing these data is a small, but significant first step in developing a more complete picture of how teachers and learners utilize our resources and the impact they may have. 

In the coming weeks, we look forward to talking more about the AAAL discussion – especially taking a closer look at some of the panel participant’s empirical research projects that investigate the effects of OER on foreign language learning and teaching. In the meantime, we invite you to take a look at the Spring 2014 newsletter and also check out a one-page handout we made – Open Educational Resources: The Basics – for last week’s Open Education Week  Celebration.

Building Community at AATSP

By Carl Blyth

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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.