Open Up

Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

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..

Maximize Your ACTFL 2013 Convention Experience — Earn A Digital Badge

From the editor

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If you’re attending the 2013 ACTFL convention in Orlando, we wanted to let you know about an exciting opportunity to earn a digital badge called the “Convention Networker.”

ACTFL-digital-badgeCOERLL and ACTFL have partnered together to develop this badge to showcase your efforts in connecting and networking with other convention attendees — f2f and through social media. Why is this important? Digital badges are fast becoming the means of showcasing professional experience and knowledge.

 

Watch this video for a quick ramp-up on badges:

 

ACTFL President and Loveland High School French teacher Toni Theisen recently shared her excitement about badges in COERLL’s Fall 2013 newsletter:

COERLL-Newsletter-Fall2#1B0“I want ACTFL members to learn about the badge concept and the potential of recognizing their skills and expertise at a more detailed level. This is why we are partnering with COERLL to present the first ever ACTFL badge. ACTFL can lead the way for developing ideas of using badges to recognize many possibilities of professional teaching and learning through multiple paths of credentialing.”

See COERLL’s Fall 2013 newsletter for the full text.

Then visit www.actflbadges.org to sign up and find out what you need to do to earn your ACTFL 2013 digital badge.

Leading up to the convention, stay tuned to learn more about the potential of digital badges for foreign language professionals.

5 Ways to Open Up Corpora for Language Learning

By Rachael Gilg

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Corpora developed by linguists to study languages are a promising source of authentic materials to employ in the development of OER for language learning. Recently, COERLL’s SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom project launched a new open resource that seeks to make it easy to search and adapt materials from a video corpus.

The SpinTX video archive  provides a pedagogically-friendly web interface to search hundreds of videos from the Spanish in Texas Corpus. Each of the videos is accompanied by synchronized closed captions and a transcript that has been annotated with thematic, grammatical, functional and metalinguistic information. Educators using the site can also tag videos for features that match their interests, and share favorite videos in playlists.

A collaboration among educators, professional linguists, and technologists, the SpinTX project leverages different aspects of the “openness” movement including open research, open data, open source software, and open education. It is our hope that by opening up this corpus, and by sharing the strategies and tools we used to develop it, others may be able to replicate and build on our work in other contexts.

So, how do we make a corpus open and beneficial across communities? Here are 5 ways:

1. Create an open and accessible search interface

Minimize barriers to your content. Searching the SpinTX video archive requires no registration, passwords or fees. To maximize accessibility, think about your audience’s context and needs. The SpinTX video archive offers a corpus interface specifically for educators, and plans to to create a different interface for researchers.

2. Use open content licences

Add a Creative Commons license to your corpus materials. The SpinTX video archive uses a CC BY-NC-SA license that requires attribution but allows others to reuse the materials different contexts.

3. Make your data open and share content

Allow others to easily embed or download your content and data. The SpinTX video archive provides social sharing buttons for each video, as well as providing access to the source data (tagged transcripts) through Google Fusion Tables.

4. Embrace open source development

When possible, use and build upon open source tools. The SpinTX project was developed using a combination of open source software (e.g. TreeTagger, Drupal) and open APIs (e.g. YouTube Captioning API). Custom code developed for the project is openly shared through a GitHub repository.

5. Make project documentation open

Make it easy for others to replicate and build on your work. The SpinTX team is publishing its research protocols, development processes and methodologies, and other project documentation on the SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom blog.

Openly sharing language corpora may have wide-ranging benefits for diverse communities of researchers, educators, language learners, and the public interest. The SpinTX team is interested in starting a conversation across these communities. Have you ever used a corpus before? What did you use it for? If you have never used a corpus, how do you find and use authentic videos in the classroom?  How can we make video corpora more accessible and useful for teachers and learners?

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gilgRachael Gilg is the Project Manager and Lead Developer for COERLL’s Spanish in Texas Corpus project and the SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom project. She has acted as project manager, designer, and developer on a diverse set of projects, including educational websites and online courses, video and interactive media, digital archives, and social/community websites.

Language Knowmads Wanted

From the editor

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We found a kindred thinker in education futurologist, John Moravec at the University of Minnesota — take a look at his vision for Society 3.0 (that’s us!). Moravec describes members of Society 3.0 as agents of:

  • change
  • globalization
  • innovation fueled by knowmads (“nomadic knowledge workers”)

Sound familiar? A key aspect of Society 3.0 involves online open access, crowd sourcing that promotes sharing, remixing, and capitalizing on new ideas. We know that much of this happens through online communities — where knowmads gather in virtual spaces to push ideas into reality.

Pages from COERLL-Newsletter-Spring-2013In COERLL’s Spring 2013 newsletter, we share what we’re doing to nurture Society 3.0’s language communities.

First, we’re launching eComma, a web application and resources for social reading — where groups of users annotate the same text together.

Also, COERLL’s SpinTX Corpus-to-Classroom Project aims to create a self-sustaining community of linguists, technologists, and Spanish language educations collaborating on a video-based website for teaching Spanish.

And check out the facebook language communities we moderate: COERLL, Francais interactif, Deutisch im Blick, Brazilpod, Spanish in Texas.

Finally, this. Us. Here. At Open Up, we want to connect with other language learning  knowmads looking for ways to accelerate change toward open education. So please get in touch with us with your ideas for sharing, remixing, and capitalizing on open language resources. Join the conversation!

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For more about fostering language learning communities, see MOOCs + Learning Networks = The Mixxer by Todd Bryant.

Give Us Some Credit!

From the editor

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It’s an exciting time. We’re seeing the next phase of open education happening: progress toward accreditation for open online learning. We thought we’d share the latest news in this welcome trend.

  • Academic Partnerships + MOOC2Degree  Academic Partnerships, representing online learning for some 40 U.S. universities, is launching the MOOC2Degree program. This online degree option is meant to attract students to full degree programs.
  • Coursera + UCB, UCI, Duke & U of Penn  Coursera and four top universities are piloting a system of awarding university credit equivalency for its online courses.
  • Udacity + San Jose State  MOOCs purveyor Udacity partnered with San Jose State University to offer academic credit for a few of its courses.
  • EdX + Stanford  Standford has teamed up with EdX in the effort to open up its online courses to a wider audience. It’s not clear what sort of credit learners receive, but courses are taught by Stanford professors (via interactive video) and include formative and summative assessments.
  • MOOCs + Georgia State  The university is working on granting credit for MOOCs coursework from other institutions.
  • COERLL + LARC  Right here on the language learning home front, COERLL is collaborating with sister language resource center LARC at San Diego State University to develop a badge system for professional development based on an open platform. In the works is a curriculum for COERLL’s Spanish Proficiency Training and Foreign Language Teaching Methods, both open educational resources.

What are you thoughts on awarding credit for open online learning? What should we be aware of as we go forward? For example, credited courses are rarely free — Coursera users  can expect to pay up to $200 for credit, for instance. But what is this compared to university tuitions?

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To read more on the topic, see Why I Love and Hate My Spanish MOOC by Fernando Rubio.

Dialogue, Community, and the Creation of OER

By Carl Blyth

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Since COERLL began in August 2010, the biggest lesson we’ve learned is that open educational resources (OER) are the products of a community of end users. Just as Wikipedia is the result of its contributors, OERs result from educators and learners who collaborate for the greater good.  Having learned this lesson, we have shifted our emphasis to the creation and curation of a community of open educators.

The Role of Dialogue

Dialogue is the key to developing a community, including the COERLL community. To that end, we have taken multiple steps to foster dialogue with those interested in the benefits of open education for language learning. We have added Facebook sites to several of our OERs such as Français interactif, Deutsch im Blick, and Brazilpod.

We have begun this blog — Open Up — to dialogue directly with language teachers and OER developers.

And finally, COERLL just finished co-hosting the annual meeting of the International Association of Dialogue Studies (IADA).  The conference explored the role of dialogue in the creation of communities of practice. According to Etienne Wenger, a learning theorist who popularized the concept, “communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”

Dialogue Conference Report

During the conference, speakers emphasized the role of dialogue in different types of human interaction, including the professional sphere, e.g.,  doctor-patient interaction, teacher-student interaction,  and reporter-editor interaction.  While the speakers came from different theoretical backgrounds — interaction analysis, conversation analysis, dialogue analysis, and ethnography of speaking–they shared a common goal: to understand the role of communication in communities of practice.

dialogue conference

As part of the conference program, COERLL hosted a panel discussion on the theme of “Curating OER Communities of Practice.”  Orlando Kelm, developer of Brazilpod, spoke about his efforts to curate a community of practice among the users of this popular Portuguese website.  The directors of SPinTX (Spanish in Texas), Jacqueline Toribio and Barbara Bullock, discussed the challenges of getting different communities to talk to each other.  For example, the SpinTX project facilitates a dialogue between Spanish language educators and the developers of the Spanish in Texas video corpus in order to build a pedagogically friendly interface for the videos. 

The bottom line is this: OERs are the product of their community. And dialogue is key to community-building.  So, please, help us build the COERLL community by dialoguing with us. Conference attendees, please feel free to add comments here about the event. Did the experience spark new ideas, new collaborations? Please share your experience. Together, we can build better OERs and a more open world.

“We’re Committed to Openness in Content Creation”

By Scott Rapp

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From the editor: We had the opportunity to interview Scott Rapp, co-founder of the Instreamia language learning platform and the designer and instructor of a new first-year Spanish MOOC (4,762 students enrolled). Check back with Open Up to find out about Scott’s new Language Teaching MOOC for creating blended learning environments.

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OU: How did you learn Spanish and what motivated you to create Instreamia?

SR:  My brother, Ryan, and I each spent two years abroad volunteering, Ryan went to Japan, and I went to Honduras. Learning Japanese and Spanish was a necessity.

Years later we were both working for Deloitte–Ryan in Japan and I in DC. We began discussing our strategies for learning languages, which was especially on Ryan’s mind as he had to do everything in Japanese, and he was also constantly being asked how he learned Japanese and recommendations for how they could learn English.

We decided that a well-indexed set of reference tools combined with natural language processing really took a lot of the tediousness out of learning a language. We gradually worked on building a product around RSS feeds and text-based sources when the “big idea” hit me like a ton of bricks: What if we could go beyond text-only sources, and focus our strategy on subtitled videos? Then we could integrate our powerful toolset into a video player! This led to other breakthrough innovations, like the dynamic exercises and adaptive learning with time-series depreciation that Instreamia includes today.

Originally called StudyStream, the Rapp brothers renamed their resource to Instreamia before rolling out their Spanish MOOC in January 2013.

OU: Why did you decide to make your courses open?

SR: Developing the Instreamia software, we wanted it to have a positive impact on the most people possible. We also recognized that many of the ideas for improvements and future developments would come from language learners and teachers, and that has proven true time and again. We still feel strongly that content development efforts by educators (including ourselves) are best made in Open Educational Resources. Our platform can’t work without excellent content, and obtaining and maintaining licensing for hundreds of videos, learning modules, dictionaries, and explanations would greatly undermine the scalability and versatility of our platform.

OU: But you are going to start charging a $99 registration fee? (Learn more.)

SR:  All the investment in Instreamia has been founders’ capital. Before quitting Deloitte, Ryan put away a substantial seed investment that he was able to live on for over a year while he began the development of Instreamia. I still work full-time, and work on Instreamia and the SpanishMOOC in my free time, and invest a portion of my salary to Instreamia.

We knew the time would come for us to change from an entirely free platform to having paid services or premium features. We want to stay true to our decision of making all the content free and open, and we will continue to publish all the materials we or any users create through Creative Commons.

OU: What were the factors behind the decision to charge the fee?

SR: During our initial offering of our Spanish MOOC, we realized the level of effort and commitment to our students (especially hand-grading assignments) could not be handled solely by volunteers. We were faced with a difficult decision: we could shut down the Spanish MOOC offering altogether, degrade the experience by excluding any teacher interaction, or … offer an improved course with paid TAs and graders, and charge a registration fee. We decided to add the fee, so we could offer a much improved learning experience.

OU: What are aspects of your courses that remain open?

SR: Our technology and code-base is not open-source. It’s proprietary and has a patent pending. But we’re committed to openness in content creation. Here’s how teachers, graders, and even advanced learners can contribute to each of our content categories:

  • Native-Content Subtitled Audio/Videos – These are either user-created (under CC), Instreamia-created (under CC), or they are used with permission from YouTube. Teachers can write text, record audio, and translate the transcript through Instreamia’s Video Editor.
  • Instructional Videos – These are videos we make available on our YouTube Channel (under CC). Any teacher can contribute by creating their own YouTube channel and embedding their videos on the Instreamia Lesson Creator.
  • Lessons – These are either user-created (under CC), or Instreamia-created (under CC). Teachers can write text, embed Instructional Videos, and create exercises based on the Native-Content library.
  • Grammar Explanations –  These are lessons with special indexing, so that teachers and graders can direct their students to them. For example, typing @gustar anywhere in a lesson or comment would create a link to the Gustar grammar explanation.
  • Dictionary Entries – Every word has audio pronunciation (Forvo, not CC), definitions (Princeton’s WordNet, free license), and multilingual relations, or translations (Instreamia, CC). When a user notices a word with an inaccurate or missing translation, he/she can edit it, so our users are making our translations better all the time.

As a community we can make and maintain content that frees us from using archaic textbooks. (See “Got Textbooks? From This Century?”) Together as a group of educators, we can provide a better learning experience without having to license content. This will make teaching languages more scalable and affordable, and it will allow for rapidly-evolving curricula.

OU: Do you have any questions for our readers?

SR: We have so much to say and to discuss, and we’d love to hear comments from you!

  • How would your classroom change if a computer were able to assign and grade homework based on each individual student’s needs?
  • What methods have you found to make students fall in love with the subject matter

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Scott RappScott Rapp is professor of SpanishMOOC, an open initiative to teach Spanish to large groups of people online. He is also the co-founder of the adaptive language learning platform Instreamia, which enables blended teaching by dynamically creating interactive lessons based on native content.

What You Need to Know about Creative Commons

By Todd Bryant

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From the editor: As the Open Education Week online event continues around the world (March 11-15), we’re giving you this quick tutorial on open licensing.

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The goal of Creative Commons licensing is to facilitate a wide distribution of work online. The creator retains some rights, but understands that letting go of his/her work and ideas is the best way to let them grow. (See Set Them Free: How to Share Your Materials by Georges Detiveaux.)

About Creative Commons

All Creative Commons (CC) licenses allow non-commercial educators to use the materials for free as long as they credit the licensor. Most also allow for the remixing and modification of these resources. In addition to providing educators a legal way of finding media for their lessons, students can benefit by producing their own digital projects for credit and then sharing their work online under a CC license.

For those new to creative commons, start at www.creativecommons.org.  If you’re looking for ways to share your work online, check out the Licenses drop-down menu at the top to learn about and choose the right license for you. If you’re looking for resources, go to the Explore box and click Find CC-licensed works to access a metasearch utility. You can search some of the largest sites for different types of media, and you can restrict search results to those available under a Creative Commons license.

And Much More …

In addition to the Creative Commons website, you can also search for resources on the internet by specific media. Most of the sites I list below allow you to narrow the results to those with CC licenses. Some of these sites are part of the Creative Commons metasearch mentioned above, although I have found that searching for resources on the individual sites lets you search with greater granularity. 

Audio

  • ccMixter  – Music collection, great for podcast introductions and video backgrounds.
  • freeSound – Sounds, especially background sounds for digital productions. For example, a digital story about Spain can include the sounds of the subway in Madrid.
  • Macaulay Library – Sounds of nature, note they have their own terms of use.

Video

  • Youtube – It isn’t obvious how to narrow your selection to Creative Commons videos. Do a general search first, and then choose Creative Commons by clicking on the Filters tool under the search field.
  • Vimeo – Similar to YouTube, you have to do a general search first, and then click the Show Advanced Filters button to select a Creative Commons license.

Images

  • Flickr – This photo sharing site was one of the original driving engines for the popularity of creative commons resources. Many government agencies and museums host their collections there, which makes it odd that you have to do a general search first then click the Advanced Search link before you can select the Creative Commons checkbox at the bottom.
  • 500px – A rival photo sharing site.  You search by specific Creative Commons licenses, which may be a positive or negative.
  • Realia Project – Their image collection is much smaller, but if you’re not looking for something specific it can be a good place for ideas. They don’t have a specific license, but allow non-commercial use to educators.

In addition, there are many public domain resources that are freely available for use, usually because the works were created by the government or their copyright has expired. Many public domain resources can be found at the Internet Archive.  (Even if you aren’t looking for anything specific, the Wayback Machine is worth a look.)

If you have other resources, please include them in the comments below.

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ProfileToddBryantTodd Bryant (@MixxerSite or @bryantt) is a liaison to the foreign language departments for the Academic Technology group at Dickinson College and an adjunct German instructor. He created The Mixxer to help connect language students with native speakers. His interests include the immersive effect of games in service of foreign language learning, such as the use of World of Warcraft to teach German.

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For more information on  searching Creative Commons, see COERLL’s infographic How to Search for Openly Licensed Educational Resources.

Open Up on Open Education Week

From the editor

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Are you new to the concept of open education? Do you need a crash course on the lingo, the collective mission, and what’s available out there for educators and learners? You’re in luck.

March 11-15 is Open Education Week. A week-long online festival where “more than 100 universities, colleges, schools and organizations from all over the world come together to showcase what they’re doing to make education more open, free, and available to everyone.” The goal of Open Education Week is to raise awareness about free and open educational opportunities.

Check out COERLL‘s contributions to the Resources section:

 

BOLDD: At the Speed of Language

By Kathryn Murphy-Judy

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It’s the current speed and ubiquity of growth of online language learning at the beginning levels that has brought together an open community of designers, teachers, teacher trainers, and scholars, calling ourselves the BOLDD (Basic Online Language Design & Delivery) Collaboratory. We experiment and interact, sometimes face-to-face, but more often using the very social media and electronic tools of our emergent, open access economy.

On the top page of the BOLDD wiki you can see the who, what, where, for whom, how, and why of this collaboratory. Whoever has the link can view our work and any member can accord full editorial access and status to newcomers. We welcome lurking, but ask that visitors contribute to and share with the collective.

Some of us have designed whole programs for the institutions we teach at, for instance, I’ve created a four-course suite for beginning-intermediate French for VCU. Some have created a course or two, some are freelance, some focus on teacher preparation, some are in the planning stages.

How one collaborates and what one shares depend upon the individual. What individuals produce runs the gamut, from entirely open access to grant funded to institutional to proprietary materials and courses. Whatever BOLDD produces collaboratively, however, is OER and open to anyone.

Much of our collaboration thus far has been to identity and organize ourselves and to start sharing our knowledge and resources at regional and national conferences. In 2012 we presented at CALICO , FLAVA , ACTFL , and the University of Pennsylvania Symposium 2012. The Google Presentations we co-created for each venue are attached to the wiki.

Kathryn_workshopThis year, subgroups of our collective will hold workshops at NECTFL, SCOLT, CALICO, FLAVA and, hopefully, at ACTFL again. Subgroups are, likewise, beginning to work on a position paper for ACTFL on the adaptations of the ACTFL Standards for the entirely online environment that will underscore their foundational place, all the while accounting for the specificities (and range thereof) of the environment for learners, teachers, content and media.

The field is pretty much the Wild, Wild West — with the good, the bad, and the ugly and a bit of the fast and the furious thrown in. We look to thinkers like social media theorist Clay Shirky to contemplate the workings of collaborative social media for our learners as well as for ourselves and our institutions. (See Use Your Cognitive Surplus to Improve Foreign Language Education by Carl Blyth.)

The products, practices and perspectives for individual deliverables as well as what we create for BOLDD are part of a radical new economy that we don’t entirely have a handle on! The ‘value’ attributed to online learning circulates and has different, ofttimes conflicting, meaning for administrators, designers, teachers, learners and other stakeholders (communities, families, governments). Several of us, in fact, are checking out a Spanish MOOC, thanks to the suggestion of Marlene Johnshoy of CARLA. Marlene invited all BOLDD educators considering aspects of this learning platform to participate in the Spanish MOOC. She obtained permission from the instructor, Scott Rapp, asking if we “teacher-lurkers” could participate.  Then she set up a discussion board for us to chat about our experiences  “lurked.”

Questions we are asking ourselves and you:

  • What percentage of basic (first and second year) language classes do you see being delivered entirely online in 5 years? 10 years?  
  • Do you think it will affect the overall percentage of  foreign language students at the post secondary level (see: MLA 2009 survey that shows in 1965 16.5% of college students took a foreign language v. only 8.6% in 2009)? 

Please join the conversation and the ride!

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KathrynKathryn Murphy-Judy, Ph.D. (Associate Professor, School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University), teaches French and global media literacies and works in technology enhanced language learning (TELL). She has designed and delivered online French for first and second year and founded the BOLDD Collaboratory to share via social media good design and teaching practices in online language courses.

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To read more about innovative collaboration in language education, check out ACTFL Innovates: Think Outside the Book by Tom Welch.