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The Impact of OER on Teaching

July 18, 2019 Leave a Comment

Photo credit: “Impact” by flickr user Walter-Wilhelm, resized and edited for this blog Creative Commons License

COERLL hosted an online “OER hangout” on June 3rd on the subject of the impact of open educational resources (OER) on teaching practices. With 32 people attending, four instructors shared their experiences creating openly licensed resources for teaching and learning languages:

  • Julianne Hammink, Instructional Design & Development Coordinator at the Center for ESL at the University of Arizona who is developing OER for ESL
  • David Thompson, Professor of Spanish at Luther College and author of a set of four problem-based units for Advanced Spanish
  • Sonia Balasch, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics in the Department of Language and Literature at Eastern Mennonite University and co-author of Español y cultura en perspectiva
  • Margherita Berti, Doctoral student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona, and creator of Italian Open Education, which features 360° Virtual Reality videos.

Although the topic of the hangout was teaching practices, OER can have an impact before teaching has even begun. The panelists pointed out that developing OER made them think more about their course design, giving them more insight into their own instructional practices and goals.

One common factor of success that each panelist mentioned was community. OER can do the often difficult job of bringing different members of the campus community together, for example, librarians, digital humanitarians, and centers for teaching and learning. Each panelist mentioned having talked to their colleagues for advice at some point during the OER development process. After publishing her OER, Sonia heard from faculty at other institutions who were using her materials and she went on to mentor colleagues as they developed their own curricula, thus growing the community.

OER can broach topics that are more challenging, current, and relevant than in a traditional textbook. The panelists exposed their students to a variety of topics. For Sonia, it was social justice. For Margherita, it was virtual reality access to non-touristic locations that would show Italian culture from a more everyday perspective. For David, it was controversies in Spain, such as bullfighting.

This kind of subject matter has the potential to motivate students to think critically. David pointed out that “part of the goal… is to present students with messy or incomplete information that they must then combine and recombine in order to develop a reasonable solution… OER lends itself well to being… less curated or edited for a classroom context.” And this format gave his students the space to develop their collaborative skills.

David, Sonia, and Margherita have all published their materials, and Julianne is beginning to pilot her materials this semester. But their work is still evolving. At the end of each semester, Sonia asks her students in their evaluation if they have any changes to suggest, and then updates the materials accordingly. She said “the readings will be better, thanks to my students. We don’t have the final word on anything… that’s the idea.”

For more information:

  • Watch the June 3rd OER Hangout recording
  • View other resources from the hangout

Thank you to our four panelists and to everyone who attended! COERLL is planning more OER hangouts for the fall, where we will emphasize various topics in OER (including student-authored OER) and allow plenty of time for questions and discussion. Keep an eye on our social media and our mailing list for more information!

 

Filed Under: Open education philosophy, Spanish Tagged With: 360, bullfighting, culture, David Thompson, Eastern Mennonite University, ESL, Español y cultura en perspectiva, hangout, Italian, Italian Open Education, Julianne Hammink, Luther College, Margherita Berti, OER, PBL, problem based, project based, social justice, Sonia Balasch, Spanish, University of Arizona, virtual reality

Best of MERLOT: Award-Winning World Language Resources

By Laura Franklin

March 19, 2013 1 Comment

In my last post, I blogged about the de rigueur French sites I share with my community college students through the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT). In addition to these, I must mention that there are almost 2,500 World Languages materials in MERLOT, not just in French, but in Arabic, Chinese, ESL, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish and many other languages. There are simulations, animations, blogs, word clouds, virtual art galleries and recording studios, tutorials, videos, webquests and worksheets. The cost is just a bit of your time.

One of the most effective ways to find the best of MERLOT is by exploring the recipients of our World Languages Editor’s Choice and MERLOT Classics Awards. The Classic Award winners are chosen among outstanding online resources designed to enhance teaching and learning. The Editor’s Choice Award is an honor bestowed on one excellent learning material among all the Classics Award winners. An easy way to peruse all the award-winning resources is to visit the About MERLOT Awards/Exemplary Materials page,  

Top 3 Editor’s Choice Recipients
  1. LangMedia consists of a collection of target language videos done by international students from the Five Colleges of Massachusetts in their home countries. Videos in languages from Arabic to Wolof are included with transcripts, images and realia. See videos of French as it is spoken in a variety of Francophone nations, Spanish in the Spanish-speaking world, etc. There is also a substantial Bangla/Bengali collection, Czech, Croatian and on through the alphabet of languages. In addition to the language videos, there are also CultureTalk series  that are coded for elementary, middle school and high school classes. These resources can enhance language courses anywhere or be used by prospective travelers to the regions.
  2. Ojalá que llueva café  is a timeless favorite of Spanish teachers and learners everywhere for its embedding of culture, grammar and structure. Completely in the target language, it not only contains a glossed reading of the popular song by Juan Luis Guerra, it features a beautiful photo gallery of the Dominican Republic and many exercises to teach the subjunctive in an engaging way. Author Barbara K. Nelson, went on to create many modules using a similar format in her five-star Spanish.language&culture site.
  3. Lingu@net Worldwide  (formerly Lingu@netEuropa) catalogues some 3,500 learning materials all geared toward learning languages. Linguanet Worldwide allows users to discern their learning styles, to find conversation partners and to locate resources to enhance their knowledge of the target language and culture. The resources it points to reach a wide and diverse potential audience: casual learners of languages in a variety of age groups, students of languages for professional or academic reasons and others.

I hope this tour of the best of MERLOT inspires Open Up readers to submit their own work to MERLOT World Languages and to comment upon what they find in our collections. For instance, what features do you want to see that are not already in MERLOT now?

—

LauraLaura Franklin teaches French online at the Extended Learning Institute, Northern Virginia Community College. She is one of the original Co-Editors of MERLOT World Languages. For information on becoming a MERLOT World Languages Peer Reviewer, contact Laura at lfranklin@nvcc.edu.

—

To find more OER for languages, see Open Up on Open Education Week.

Filed Under: Finding OER, Instructional Materials, Open education philosophy, Publishing OER, Remixing OER, Spanish, Teacher Development Tagged With: Arabic, Chinese, ESL, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Language learning, MERLOT, OER, Remix OER, Sharing resources, Textbook

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