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Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

Reviewers Needed

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Photo credit: “Group” by Pixabay user Geralt, Public Domain

Almost a year ago, COERLL launched the Language OER Network, a website that features teachers, students, and staff who are using, creating, and promoting OER. Featured educators receive a badge and are listed on the website under different categories of work: OER Teacher, OER Creator, OER Reviewer, and OER Ambassador. The lists of featured people are growing in every category except one: OER Reviewer.

We encourage teachers to review the free materials they access online, especially if those materials are open educational resources (OER). (We define OER here as any material for teaching and learning that has an open license.) Since OER are self-published, people who use them don’t always know how or if they were reviewed. There is not always a guarantee OER will be high quality.

Many authors of open materials take great care in having their materials vetted: they may work on teams, ask colleagues to proofread, go through a formal review process, or test the materials many times with students before publication. However, not everyone has the time or resources to go through this process. This is where peers can be very helpful in reviewing each others’ content after it has been published.

OER repositories like MERLOT and OER Commons, or even other platforms for sharing copyrighted materials like Teachers Pay Teachers, offer ways to review materials. Often, a user can give a star rating and write a comment. Other platforms have a more involved and formal peer review process. For example, the Open Textbook Library at the University of Minnesota has faculty review open textbooks based on a specified set of criteria, resulting in a comprehensive, multi-paragraph review.

Reviews help add legitimacy to materials posted online, where anyone with an internet connection can publish something. A review can:

  • help teachers sift through a mountain of content to find what is high quality
  • provide useful feedback to content authors
  • offer a forum for teachers to express gratitude to their colleagues for sharing their work
  • ideally, encourage teachers to talk to each other about ideas for teaching and to participate in a community.

If you have used open Creative Commons licensed materials in your teaching (including COERLL’s materials), please consider reviewing them.

How to Write a Review

You can write a review in any public form: a repository like MERLOT or OER Commons (other repositories are listed here), a blog post, or anywhere else you can think of.

We recommend that rather than simply rating an OER with a number of stars and giving a generic response like “great activity”, teachers write a little bit about how they used the materials, how the students reacted, and what specific features worked or did not work.

How to Earn a Badge

Once you have written a review in a public forum, you can apply to receive an OER Reviewer badge from COERLL.

Availability of Foreign Language materials in OER repositories

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Photo credit: flickr user gotcredit.com Creative Commons License

Here at COERLL, we encourage teachers to use Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) in their classes. One way to begin using OER and OEP is to search for and use pedagogical materials (lessons, activities, and courses) that other teachers have posted online in OER repositories. To help navigate through the many options, we’ve gone through all of the OER repositories we know of to see what the benefits are of each one, and how much language content is available. This is a summary of what we found, we hope after you read this you will want to either search on some of these sites, or upload your own materials for sharing! And please let us know in the comments if you know of other repositories not included here!

Criteria for evaluating repositories

This criteria was loosely based on Atenas and Havemann’s key OER repository themes of searching, sharing, reusing, and collaborating, set out in their 2013 article ‘Quality Assurance in the Open: An Evaluation of OER Repositories’, which can be found online here.1

  • availability of language content – does the repository have at least some content for language learning, and is it easy to find?
  • tools for vetting – does the platform provide for peer reviews or some other vetting/editorial process to assure teachers access to quality content?
  • ease of remixing – does the platform encourage teachers to edit materials and personalize them for their students?
  • licensing information – are licenses clearly marked? do licenses allow for fair attribution, sharing, and remixing of content? are Creative Commons licenses encouraged?
  • metadata quality – does metadata facilitate searches using different criteria (e.g. languages, proficiency level, etc.)?
  • any other qualities that create an engaging and creative space for sharing materials and ideas,such as tools to help teachers communicate and interact with each other

Repositories with language materials

MERLOT

A well respected and mature (started in 1997) repository for lessons and activities. There are lots of options for collaboration and communication, so that it’s not just a repository but a community around sharing resources.

  • Lots of language content
  • Peer reviews are available for many of the entries and Merlot’s editorial board selects their favorites
  • Teachers can discuss the materials with each other in a comments section.
  • Easy to create a learning exercise around the materials.
  • Licensing information is clearly marked (not all content is Creative Commons licensed)
  • The longevity of the platform has allowed the best materials to emerge over time – here’s a list of some award winning ones

Open Textbook Library

The best part about this textbook repository is the elaborate rating system and emphasis on peer reviews and the vetting process.

  • There is a detailed list of criteria to guide users in reviewing materials.
  • Licensing information is clearly marked.
  • Some COERLL textbooks have just been added to the language page!

OER Commons

OER Commons is a large repository for any kind of materials (lessons, activities, textbooks, etc.). It has tools in place for thorough evaluation, remixing, creation, and licensing.

  • About 700 language materials and language support for resources and metadata
  • Users can evaluate materials based on Common Core standards and an extensive rubric. There is also a general rating available (out of 5 stars).
  • The system guides users in choosing a Creative Commons license upon upload
  • The lesson builder allows teachers to create new materials or reuse existing.

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative

Full courses available from Carnegie Mellon, for teachers looking for structured and complete courses.

  • Chinese, Spanish, French, Arabic
  • Plentiful guides and resources for teachers.
  • Licensed with a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
  • Users can add content but can’t remove or revise content from a course.
  • Free for instructors and independent learners, $50 for enrolled students.
  • Compatible with LMS.
  • Statistics about student use help teachers track progress and help Carnegie Mellon research education theories.

Open Course Library

Professionally laid out materials are easy to find and edit in this library of courses from the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.

  • 3 levels each of Spanish, French, and Sign Language
  • All materials are in google docs which makes them easy to modify.
  • All content is clearly marked as Creative Commons licensed.

Language Resource Centers (LRC) portal

The website for the 16 national Language Resource Centers (of which COERLL is one), where you can search a list of over 800 classroom and professional development materials.

  • Language content only (there are materials for LCTLs too)
  • Lots of criteria to help users narrow searches down
  • Materials have been vetted by language specialists

Curriki

Curriki does a good job of emphasizing community, and its wide range of review options helps users to sift through a lot of activities and other content.

  • 2765 entries under “World Language” content, but not all are for language teaching
  • Review options are plentiful: Members can give ratings and reviews, Curriki reviews some content based on Technical Completeness, Content Accuracy, and Appropriate Pedagogy, and there are collections curated by Curriki (no curated language collections yet though)
  • There is a separate community for teachers to discuss how to use materials.
  • Choosing a license is a prerequisite for uploading materials
  • Users can align materials with standards.

TES

TES is a repository where teachers share activities. Some activities cost a small fee but the World Languages section and the remixing tools make this site worth looking through.

  • American Sign Language, Ancient Greek, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, etc.
  • Teachers can review materials
  • All content is labeled with a license, either Creative Commons or the TES teaching resource license
  • Their related site, Blendspace, encourages remixing and is easily accessible from TES
  • Share My Lesson allows users to build a lesson plan around TES materials

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) makes course materials from MIT classes available for the public.

  • A good range of languages represented.
  • All instructor created materials share a CC BY NC SA license
  • Course materials includes any combination of syllabus, calendar, list of readings, assignments, online/related resources, study materials, instructor insights, and sometimes even course videos.
  • Though the instructor created materials are free and openly licensed, some of the course materials referenced are not free or open.

Wikibooks and Wikiversity

Wikibooks and Wikiversity are both run by Wikimedia. There are currently a lot of incomplete materials there but with the ease of editing, options to add auxiliary materials, and discussion tools, these platforms could be a rich resource.

  • Many languages (mostly reference grammars) on Wikibooks, some on Wikiversity
  • Discussion tabs encourage community and collaboration
  • There’s an option to add exercises on Wikibooks
  • Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

LORO

LORO is all language content! It contains mostly activities rather than whole textbooks or collections. It’s supported by The Univesity of Southhampton and the Open University.

  • Exclusively for languages
  • Users can comment on or “like” materials
  • All content is CC licensed.

Repositories with fewer language options but with a unique angle on OER

Some other repositories are set up well but have little or no language offerings. I’d like to mention them anyways as examples of all the ways a repository can encourage sharing and collaboration.

  • Portland State University Open Text offers a carefully curated set of textbooks with a growing number of language books
  • BC Campus Open Ed has all the right tools for building a community of collaboration around the available CC licensed textbooks, including detailed criteria for peer review and resources for adopting and modifying texts.
  • The Orange Grove is the state of Florida’s repository. One of its best features is its detailed metadata which makes it easy to search for content.
  • Gooru offers CC licensed collections of materials, and many other features such as games and tools for remixing content and measuring student progress.
  • OpenStax CNX offers fully vetted, modularized textbooks, and an option for sharing activities and lessons.
  • The Sofia Project is a smaller repository, but it’s interesting to look through because of the large amount of auxiliary materials, like syllabi, rubrics, schedules, assignments, projects, exams, and even sample student assignments.
  • The Global Text Project is a grassroots approach to textbooks and encourages teachers to adopt books and work with their students to make them better.
  • The Saylor Foundation provides well organized and complete CC licensed courses with a lot of auxiliary material, and peer review and feedback are encouraged.
  • Storyweaver is not quite a repository but it offers a good model for collaborative language work… anyone can upload storybooks in any language (41 languages represented so far), and members of the community can comment on stories, share on social media, translate them or edit them for different levels of readers.

Other repositories

Areas for improvement

  • Tagging: Some repositories appear to have more language content than they do because content in a foreign language is tagged under the same category as content for teaching foreign languages. So for example, a Portuguese lesson about biology for Portuguese speakers could be in the same category as a Portuguese learning lesson for English speakers.
  • Use cases: Most repositories don’t specifically encourage a teacher who uploads a resource to explain how they used the the resource in their classroom. This information could help other teachers save time and give them new ideas about teaching methods.
  • Remixing: Editing materials is a key aspect of OER, but some sites do not encourage it. Some repositories do encourage edits in their platforms, but the resulting new material is not usable outside of the platform.
  • Popular tools: Some of the most widely used platforms (for example, YouTube) offer free resources for education, but don’t always provide important tools: peer review options, search terms compatible with educational criteria, and open licenses.

1Atenas, Javiera and Havemann, Leo (2013) ‘Quality Assurance in the Open: An Evaluation of OER Repositories.’ INNOQUAL – International Journal for Innovation and Quality in Learning , 1 (2). pp. 22-34.

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