K-12

March 4-8, 2019 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.

COERLL Launches OER Guide for Language Teachers

This Open Ed Week, we are launching Introduction to OER for Language Teachers, a series of modules on topics related to creating and using open educational resources and practices. We developed this guide based on our conversations with teachers about open educational resources (OER) and practices (OEP) over the years. We hope these modules will help teachers who are interested in open education, especially pertaining to the use of Creative Commons licenses to share materials and ideas.

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!

Attend our Open Ed Week Collaborative Webinar

On March 6 at 1pm CST, COERLL will host a webinar where participants will break into groups to work on a task related to different aspects of OER: searching, licensing, remixing, creating, and sharing. All participants will come together at the end to share what they worked on and to find out how to continue their journey as open educators.

Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits available for teachers who attend the whole webinar. Register here.

Language OER Network is in full swing

Last year during Open Education Week, we launched the Language OER Network (LOERN), a showcase of teachers and students who are using, creating, and promoting open educational resources.

We’ve been thrilled to give digital badges to all of the people featured on LOERN: 82 faculty, teachers, librarians, undergraduate and graduate students from 50 different K-12 schools, community colleges and higher ed institutions, representing American Sign Language, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, K’iche’, Koine Greek, Korean, Linguistics, Persian, Portuguese, Spanglish, Spanish, and Yoruba.

Visit the LOERN page to join or read about your colleagues’ open work

Find other events for Open Education Week

You can discover other events around the world on the Open Education Week website. Here’s just a sample:

Learn about digital social reading in two different webinars about Perusall and Hypothes.is (these tools are similar to our tool eComma)
Take the daily Oregon OER challenge
Preview Trayectos, a Spanish open textbook project led by Dr. Gabriela Zapata and supported by COERLL
Join a global web conference
Listen to stories about OER in another language, for example this webinar about open projects in Uruguay

*Definition from the Open Education Consortium’s Open Education Week website, licensed under CC BY.

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.