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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.

Announcing a new textbook: Her Şey bir Merhaba ile Başlar!

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Editor’s note: the below post is from the introduction by Jeannette Okur to the Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar textbook and supplementary materials that she recently published with COERLL. This introduction carries a CC BY-SA license.

Hoş geldiniz! This set of openly licensed curricular materials is meant to guide learners from the Intermediate to the Advanced proficiency level in Turkish communication skills, while increasing intercultural communicative competence. Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar’s four units encourage learners to use the Turkish language to investigate, explain and reflect on the relationship between contemporary Turks’ socio-cultural practices, products and their perspectives on family, love and marriage, the environment, social activism, art, film and politics.

Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar is aligned with the ACTFL standards for Intermediate- and Advanced-level communicative skills and intercultural proficiency descriptors, and also reflects the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies (and my personal) commitment to blended instruction and the Flipped Classroom model.

One main premise of Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar is that learning a foreign language should focus on learning language in use. Thus, all activities are guided by real-life, plausible language situations: How would native and non-native speakers use the vocabulary, grammar and sociolinguistic rules in everyday contexts to make sense of what others tell them and to make
meaning themselves?

Another important premise is that curricular materials designed to help college-age or adult learners progress from the Intermediate to the Advanced proficiency level must:

  • Move from the personal realm to the societal realm in terms of content, vocabulary, text forms and discourse.
  • Provide regular opportunities for practice of the language’s “building blocks” (new vocabulary and grammar structures) and for higher order thinking tasks.
  • Balance the four communicative skills.
  • Balance seriousness and fun!

A final premise is that culture and language are fundamentally intertwined, and that culture is not a separate skill set to acquire, but rather the foundation of all language use. My colleagues at COERLL and I also believe that there is no one “target” culture, but rather that communities have a variety of subcultures, with different life experiences, practices and preferences. Therefore, we expect that the process of “learning Turkish” involves discovery about ourselves, our own cultures and assumptions as well. In the Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar units, learners will find multiple opportunities to reflect on their own perspectives as they strive to understand the viewpoints reflected in the varied Turkish examples they encounter.

Each unit will:

  • Introduce learners to culturally and socially significant phenomena in Turkey today in order to hone their cultural analytical skills through tasks that foster reflection, comparison and articulation of findings.
  • Introduce learners to a variety of authentic print, audio and audio-visual materials aimed at native Turkish audiences, guiding them to use (and reflect on) the reading, listening and viewing comprehension strategies needed to understand these Advanced-level texts.
  • Engage learners in active recognition and repeated practice of new vocabulary and grammar items.
  • Guide learners through practice of oral and written discursive strategies specific to the Advanced proficiency level.

For more information:

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Dr. Jeannette Okur has coordinated the Turkish Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin since 2010. Drawing upon extensive experience teaching not only Turkish, but also German and ESL, she continues to develop new curricular materials for Turkish language instruction at the Novice, Intermediate and Advanced proficiency levels.

Welcome to Open Education Week 2020

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March 2-6, 2020 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 COERLL’s Open Ed Week OER Hangout Webinar

Celebrate Open Education Week by attending this discussion-based webinar on Wednesday March 4 at 6:00pm CST, where you will have a chance to chat with three instructors who have adopted OER and creatively adapted the content for their language classes.

  • Alexandra Gouirand is a French faculty member at South Puget Sound Community College. She uses Français interactif as the main textbook in her French 1 class, as well as ancillary books and online resources including YouTube videos.
  • Dawn Michael has been teaching French since 1991, and is currently a high school French teacher in Ohio. She uses the open curriculum Français interactif to teach blended French 1 and 2 courses and creates her own supplements to accompany the resources.
  • Valérie Morgan is a French lecturer. She uses the open curriculum Français interactif to teach Levels 1, 2, and 3 French. To supplement the textbook she uses Google Classroom, Google Tools, Flipgrid, and Padlet.

Since Français interactif is the most widely-used OER published by COERLL, it was easier for us to find French teachers to present here, but we hope teachers of all languages will join.

There will be 20 minutes of presentation time, and the rest of the hour will be dedicated to your questions and to conversation between participants and panelists. We want to hear from you!

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! 102 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

Last year, 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 it 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.

What Rebus can do for Language Teachers

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The open education movement is full of well-meaning, very smart people who get stuff done. My favourite kind of people! These people care about students, their success, and, most-importantly, their well-being. There are lots of ways to participate in this movement: you can adopt open educational resources (OER) in your classrooms, contribute to a project in a small way, peer review an open textbook, adapt a project, create a textbook from scratch, or become an open ambassador. It’s Rebus Community’s goal to support faculty, librarians, and other open practitioners as they create, adapt, discuss, contribute, and share open textbooks.

Rebus Community is an initiative of the Rebus Foundation, a Canadian registered charity based in Montreal. In 2016, we put out our first call for pilot project teams who wanted to create open textbooks with the Rebus team providing project management support. Since then we’ve collaborated on dozens of open textbook projects in a range of disciplines. Through our experience and in collaboration with a big beautiful community of OER nerds, we developed a publishing model that is based on open principles and can be replicated by anyone with the drive to create impactful, accessible, high-quality textbooks. Today, we advocate for this model of publishing by providing training, software and resources that support OER creators.

Here’s what we offer:

  • The Textbook Success Program combines a twelve-week course and nine months of monthly check-ins. Participants are grouped into a cohort of creators from their campus and from other institutions. The result: hands-on experience with open publishing, the capacity to create more open textbooks, and a network of OER-practitioners that crosses disciplines, institutions, and countries.
  • The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) is the openly licensed documentation of our collaborative publishing model. It guides readers through the process of creating open textbooks, starting with team building, moving through peer review, and finishing with post-release considerations.
  • Our web-based software lets anyone create a project homepage for their open textbook project. The project homepage is public facing and can be used to amplify your project’s status updates, calls for participation, and eventual release announcement. Users can hold discussions on a wide array of topics, organize important resources, and connect with their team.

To date, we’ve had a number of projects concerned with language learning. I’m particularly excited about the Technology in Language Teaching team. They’re participating in the Textbook Success Program with an open textbook project that provides, “an overview of the theory and practice of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) for classroom and learn ‘anytime anywhere’ environments.”

In a meeting the other day, a colleague who once worked as a writing teacher said of language instructors, “They’re the first to break the rules and want to shift the normal practices of teaching.” As someone who works for an organization that supports alternatives to commercial textbook publishing, I hope what my colleague says is true. As I watch the language learning projects on Rebus Community grow, I am heartened. Let’s break rules!

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Leigh Kinch-Pedrosa does marketing and communications for the Rebus Foundation in Montreal, Canada. Before joining the Rebus team, Leigh produced live storytelling shows and art installations, and developed a series of workshops that encourage entrepreneurs and academics to use personal storytelling to communicate complex ideas.

Inspiring case studies of open practices to engage teachers and students

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Editor’s note: the below post is the forward by Carl S. Blyth, COERLL director, to the recently published book New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom, edited by Anna Comas-Quinn, Ana Beaven, Barbara Sawhill. The forward carries a CC BY license.  

Today, in the field of foreign language teaching, there is much talk of shifting paradigms. The term paradigm was popularized by the American physicist Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to Kuhn, scientific progress is neither linear nor continuous, but rather subject to abrupt shifts in the consensus of a scientific community. To illustrate this phenomenon, Kuhn cites the well-known shift in astronomy from geocentrism (the belief that the sun and the planets revolve around the Earth) to heliocentrism (the belief that the Earth and the planets revolve around the sun). Kuhn stresses that paradigms are defined by contrasting concepts and discourses and, as a result, are largely incommensurable. Kuhn also notes that paradigm shifts are not only a matter of accepting new facts, but of reorganizing those facts into a new worldview. In other words, paradigm shifts entail objective as well as subjective change.

Despite examples of revolutionary change in the sciences, paradigm shifts in the humanities – such as in foreign language education – appear to be more gradual. Most foreign language educators integrate new ideas into their curricular and pedagogical practices in an incremental process of professional development. Personally, I believe that paradigm change in foreign language teaching is largely a matter of educators learning by example from each other. Simply put, there is nothing more powerful than a case study for catalyzing change in our field. And in this book, New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom, foreign language specialists share their stories of personal and professional transformation in the well-known form of a case study. Following the same format, each case study provides the reader with the necessary information to understand and to implement a specific pedagogical or curricular innovation. For example, each case study includes a detailed description of a new project, the intended student outcomes, as well as the tools and resources used in the project.

While many case studies focus on the use of ready-made Open Educational Resources (OERs), others describe how to integrate Open Educational Practices (OEPs) into foreign language classes. Several case studies explain how to implement principles of open pedagogy such as the creation of a Wikipedia page or a translation of a TED Talk by the students themselves. In such cases, students are challenged to follow the editorial guidelines of Wikipedia and TED for the creation of open content. Thus, in the open language classroom, students share their knowledge with the world while, at the same time, improving their proficiency in the target language. In short, each case study described in this book is a beautiful illustration of the creative commons in action. I sincerely hope that foreign language educators who read these case studies will embrace the affordances of openness for themselves and their students and thereby shift the paradigm one classroom at a time.

For an open world.

The Impact of OER on Teaching

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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:

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!

 

Virtual Reality: Innovation in Open Education

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Photo by mentatdgt from Pexels, Public Domain

Editor’s note: This is a guest blog post by Margherita Berti, a doctoral student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) at the University of Arizona, and the creator of the open educational resource website Italian Open Education.

As the awareness about open educational resources, tools, and practices increases, instructors, researchers, and educational technologists are exploring innovative ways to promote language education. This is especially the case for Italian Open Education, a website that offers a collection of openly-licensed and free-to-use 360-degree virtual reality videos for Italian learners and teachers.

As a researcher and language educator, I chose to develop Italian Open Education to support the Open Education Movement and to supplement current foreign language textbooks with innovative and dynamic pedagogical materials. Today’s technological advances have made virtual reality extremely accessible, allowing language learners to be immersed in three-dimensional and seemingly real environments generated by the use of special electronic equipment (e.g., smartphones, viewers, headsets, etc.).

To create such resources, I first recorded 360-degree videos in Italian locations that represent everyday environments which students might encounter, however not critically reflect on, in the language textbook. Some examples include a plaza, a street, a coffee shop, a restaurant, a mall, etc. (permission to record the videos was granted by owners of inside spaces). After the recordings took place, I uploaded the videos to YouTube and licensed them under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. The Italian Open Education platform was then developed on WordPress, where all the 360-degree virtual reality videos are gathered and can be used freely.

The objective of this project is to offer new cutting-edge pedagogical resources which allow Italian language learners to be virtually placed in various Italian settings that might be inaccessible due to financial or geographical constraints. Since most students are not able to study abroad, the use of openly-licensed 360-degree virtual reality videos in the language classroom gives learners equal access to authentic environments representing the target country.

By sharing free-to-use, high-quality and innovative pedagogical materials with teachers and learners, I advocate for the Open Education Movement and aim to encourage administrators and language educators to implement new and dynamic open educational resources in their own language classrooms.

For more information:

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Margherita Berti is a doctoral student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) at the University of Arizona and holds a master’s degree in Linguistics/Teaching English as a Second Language from Indiana State University. She teaches undergraduate Italian courses and has over three years of experience in language teaching at the university level in Italian, Spanish and ESL. Her research specialization resides at the intersection of intercultural competence, educational technology, and curriculum and L2 content development..

Open Resources for Indigenous Languages

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Photo credit: “Nahuala huipil” by Sergio Romero for “Chqe’tamaj le qach’ab’al K’iche’!”, licensed under Creative Commons License

2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages, as established by UNESCO. The goal of this year is to increase support for, promotion of, and access to indigenous languages. UNESCO suggests that one approach to this goal is to “develop new and open educational resources to facilitate teaching and learning in indigenous languages”. (You can read the other suggestions on the program website.)

Since we at COERLL focus on open educational resources (OER) for language learning, we are happy to see when OER are suggested as a way to support a movement. Open Creative Commons licenses, an essential aspect of all OER, make it easier for people to access and share important information in their community and with the world, while ensuring authors are always credited for their work. This will not be a solution that suits everyone, but there are many indigenous language teachers and organizations who have chosen to make their resources available under a Creative Commons license. The list below is just a sample. Thank you to the authors of these resources for sharing their valuable knowledge.

Please share other openly-licensed indigenous language materials in the comments!

Fijian

Na vosa vakaviti – A Fijian language children’s activity book of word searches, colouring pages, and stories published by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Licensed under a CC BY-NC license.

Indigenous languages of Canada

Indigenous Storybooks makes the text, images, and audio of stories available in Indigenous languages as well as English, French, and the most widely spoken immigrant and refugee languages of Canada. It’s for children, families, community members, and educators. Inspired by Little Cree Books. Licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

Iñupiat

Iñupiat Language Community site – Lessons, activities, and additional resources for the Iñupiat language developed by Chelsey Zibell at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Licensed under a CC BY license.

Komnzo, Mauwake, Moloko, Palula, Papuan Malay, Pite Saami, Rapa Nui, Yakkha, Yauyos Quechua

Studies in Diversity Linguistics – A book series published by Language Science Press on individual less-widely studied languages (primarily reference grammars). The chief editor is Martin Haspelmath. Licensed under a CC BY license.

K’iche’

Chqe’tamaj le qach’ab’al K’iche’! – A multimedia K’iche’ curriculum in English and Spanish, comprised of 40 lessons developed by Sergio Romero, Ignacio Carvajal, Juan Manuel Tahay Tzaj, Mareike Sattler, et. al. with the support of LLILAS and COERLL at the University of Texas at Austin. Licensed under a CC BY license.

Māori

Te reo Māori pukapuka mahi – A free downloadable Māori language activity book for kids published by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Licensed under a CC BY-NC license.

Nahuatl

Language faculty and graduate students supported by LLILAS and COERLL at the University of Texas at Austin are in the process of planning materials for beginning language learners of Nahuatl. Stay tuned to the blog for updates!

Sāmoan

Gagana Sāmoa Tusi o gāluega fa‘atino – A Sāmoan language activity book of word searches, coloring pages, and stories for kids, published by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Licensed under a CC BY-NC license.

SENĆOŦEN

SENĆOŦEN Classified Word List – A list of over 3300 SENĆOŦEN words and sound files by Dr. Timothy Montler et. al. Licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

General Indigenous Language Studies

Language Learning Assessment Tool – A guide for adult learners of Indigenous languages to self-assess their learning and progress written by Dr. Onowa McIvor and Dr. Peter Jacobs of NEȾOLṈEW̱, the Indigenous Language Research Network. Licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

 

What other openly licensed indigenous language materials do you recommend?

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.