 Hello everybody, my name is Carl Blyth. I'm the director of Coral, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning. Coming to you from the University of Texas in Austin, Texas today. And we are celebrating this week, Open Education Week 2017. We have a really great webinar planned today. We have a number of speakers who are going to be talking about how they are opening up their own language classroom through the creation of of their own OER. So let me just introduce the names. We're going to be pretty informal. I've asked them all to prepare their statements, but to keep it conversational and informal. So we have Megan from Parkway School District outside of St. Louis, Alexia, Sonja, and Colleen. Three colleagues working together in the Spanish Department in George Mason University in Northern Virginia, just outside DC. So we're very happy that we are going to hear from people in public schools, secondary education, as well as higher ed. Because at Coral, as part of the Department of Education, we're focusing on the entire ecology that is K through 16. So you might have seen this image celebrating Open Education Week. And the point I want to make here is that this is a movement. It's a worldwide movement of educators who are trying to overcome barriers and obstacles that we find in the way education is structured or the way education is delivered. In essence, we're trying to open up education by giving people better access to the materials, to the scholarship, sometimes even to our courses themselves. Unfortunately, what we're finding is that education in many parts of the world is pretty much a closed system. And even in the United States, it is shutting down and keeping people out. So open educators, essentially people just like you are trying to combat these problems, these issues. And they're joining with each other. It's a collaborative enterprise teaching each other different ways, different practices to overcome these obstacles. And that's exactly what we're going to hear from these speakers today, what they're doing, kind of a do it yourself movement to overcome the problems that they've encountered. So let's get started. First of all, Coral. I have to say a couple of words about Coral, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning. We are one of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers. And we are funded by the Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Education. We're in a grant cycle that started in 2014 and that will end in 2018. And we, as I mentioned, are located here at the University of Texas at Austin. There are LRCs, Language Resource Centers from the East Coast to the West Coast and even including Hawaii. So there's 16 of us all across the nation. Our mandate, our mission is to increase the foreign language capacity of the United States. We do that through the lens of open education. And I should mention here, the bullet point says that we are the only Department of Education Title VI Center, which includes national resource centers focused on area studies, such as Mexican American studies, European studies, East Asian studies, et cetera, as well as the 16 LRCs. There are hundreds of them. We're the only one doing all this in open education. So let me begin by saying that I think we are in a crisis in education and the crisis is getting actually worse and worse. The crisis really is about, you've heard about how tuition is going up and the price of education is skyrocketing. But I want to take just a minute to focus on the issue of pedagogical materials. In American higher education, the average annual cost of materials is $1,300 per student. Now, that's the average. That's really significant, especially for people who are first in their family to go to college, maybe from lower income brackets, and they don't have that kind of money saved to pay for textbooks. We also know that various surveys have shown that many students actually drop a class once they find out how much the textbooks cost. Up to 50% of the students are doing that. And we also have evidence that many students are not buying the textbook, or maybe they go in with a number of other students and they're sharing the textbook. The point is in higher education, we've hit a tipping point, textbooks are really expensive and they're affecting graduation rates, they're affecting enrollment, and students are looking for ways to get around that. And in the public schools and secondary education, it's actually, there's a crisis there as well, because during the great recession that started, let's say in 2008 and 2009, there were severe textbook cuts to the educational budget by most states. And here we are almost 10 years later, much of that funding has not been reinstated. And what we have, of course, are teachers in classrooms who simply even have textbooks. Either they don't have the textbook or they only have, they have too few textbooks to go around, and the textbooks are soon outdated. So let me define open ed. It's a collective term that refers to forms of education in which knowledge, ideas, or important aspects of teaching methodology or infrastructure are shared freely over the internet. That's what we're doing today. And of course, the problem was pedagogical materials and we're going to look to OER to rescue us. The term OER was coined in 2002 during a UNESCO meeting and it simply refers to any educational material offered freely for anyone to use, typically involving some permission to remix, improve, and redistribute. Let me give just a little bit of information from our participants. And I'm going to ask that you fill out a couple of these polls here. So the first poll is what is your role? Are you a student or a teacher or administrator? And what's your educational level? Where are you in the educational system? What language do you teach? If you teach a language and you can just type in your answer there. And then finally, what kinds of materials do you create? You may have never created something or you've already created activities or lesson plans, whatever. So I'll just give you a minute to take a look at that, to complete our poll here. I see that the roles seem to be, there are, we have an administrator, we have teachers. So most of you, of course, are teachers. I'm glad to see we have a student. Educational level is split. We have mainly higher ed, but a good representation of K through 12. And then we have many different languages represented. That's great. And finally, activities. Everybody at some point in their teaching career comes up with an activity. Lesson plans, larger units, different forms of assessments. So everybody makes some kinds of a quiz. And a curriculum, an entire curriculum or course that's much more ambitious. Same is true, of course, as a textbook. Okay. But the point is that people certainly do have some experience and some expertise in creating these materials. These, of course, are do-it-yourself enterprises. And that's exactly what we're going to hear from our speakers today. We'll start off with a secondary story from a Parkway School District. They are developing their own curriculum, as it says here, trying to incorporate three modes of communications, driving poor elastic proficiency. And they're facing a lot of growing pains. And I've asked her to talk about those growing pains and how they're trying to incorporate best practices, authentic materials, but importantly, how to get collaboration to work among faculty within our district and outside. So, again, take it away. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for including me. I wanted to give you a little backstory on Parkway and how we have ended up in the position that we are in. There was a group of nine of us who were department chairs in 2015 that were sent to Actville by our district. And that was a huge undertaking for our district to pay for all of us to go to Actville. Well, we heard the work of Laura Terrell and Donna Clemente, and we decided Laura Terrell being a former Parkway employee and leading us, we decided to have her consult us because we wanted to create thematic units. And so we came back and we decided, okay, it's April, it's time to start thinking about next year, it's time to start thinking about our curriculum, and how can we do this? And we were in the middle of a textbook adoption. And we had looked at textbooks, we had thought we had them picked out, but as we were forming our thematic units, we decided, okay, this isn't working for us. We can't find a textbook that really supports our curriculum. And our district is very firm on making sure that the curriculum is written before adopting resources. And that only makes sense. So we found that our curriculum wasn't fitting the mold of any textbook. So there enters the first problem. So we knew that this was going to be ambitious. We knew that this was going to be a huge undertaking. We didn't roll it out as soon as we would have liked to. We worked feverishly over the summer, this past summer, trying to develop materials and pulling things from OER and different resources that we had. And we just still weren't feeling very right about this. We're very much still novice users with OER. But this past fall, we went to Actville and I'm the facilitator of Modern and Classical Languages. And my coordinator and I, Amy Belding, went to Actville and we met up with Sarah Sweeney of Coral. And we were able to talk with her and hear the message from others about how the resources out there are better than anything that we, you know, we could take what we created, we could put it out there for people to use and we could in turn take their resources, tweak them and make them better. And, you know, I guess the big take-home message for us has been that our textbook is outdated the minute that it comes to print and OER is not. There's constantly new resources out there, so much so that we have found that as we are creating these thematic units and we're in full-blown implementation mode, we've been using thematic units all year with no textbook. We've actually found how freeing it is to not have a textbook and not be locked down to a text. So that being said, it's also been a very scary road because we began to look at online resources and we began to implement those online resources in OER into our curriculum for listening activities, for interpretive activities both listening and reading. Just a plethora of information was out there so much so that one of our challenges has been that it's overwhelming to, it's overwhelming to sift through all this information and so we've really had to sit down together and collaborate. We have a thematic unit writing team have worked together in numerous small groups and language groups and our PLC groups and we've really just hammered out this curriculum using OER and using what we know is good practice with the three modes of communication and so it has not been an easy task. We have definitely run into some challenges with people. I'm responsible for creating our Google Drive with our curriculum and we put everything on Google Drive so that it is collaborated. It's shared with everyone in our district. We have probably about 54 language teachers, modern and classical languages teachers and the problem is that we find that people, they take the information, they're happy to receive it, they're very forgiving, they understand that it's not perfect, they understand that they can make it better but boy are they scared to put it out there for themselves. So to share that information even just within our own district with each other and our colleagues and so we've had lots of courageous conversations about making yourself vulnerable and you know the boomerang effect that if I put it out there that it's probably going to come back to me better than it started or I hope it does and just knowing that things aren't going to be perfect the first go around so we've learned a lot. We've learned a lot by giving up a textbook, we've learned a lot by sifting through materials, we've learned a lot about ourselves and our curriculum all through using OER and Corel has been a huge help, a huge help with their compilation of materials. We use a lot of viewer materials for our listening activities for our interpretive assessments and such. So you know it's definitely been, we've had growing pains, we've had lots of very heated emotionally charged conversations about best practice and shifting responsibility to the teacher and it's really been a it's been a challenge but at the same time it's been incredibly rewarding to sit back and say okay I created this and it's better than any textbook because I know my kids better than a textbook does and I know their needs and I know their proficiency level. So that part has been really cool. I know I talked very very quickly and so I'm just wondering if there's any questions. The question is what do you say to teachers who don't think that this is part of their role? We've had that, we've had numerous teachers say you know when I went into teaching I didn't sign up to be a curriculum writer I signed up to be a teacher and we have kind of taken the approach that you know we've started with our department chairs and little by little we have gotten people to come on board with us to drink the Kool-Aid if you will. We've had talks with administration, we've had talks with department chairs, we've had talks with PLC leaders and so we were able to we were able to then you know come together and say listen we know that you are not a curriculum writer however you are an integral part of our of our system of our district and we know that you are capable of awesome things and so we really need your help in supporting our curriculum and doing what's best for students and so we've been able to to do that. Which Coral OER were helpful? So we have used all of the online resources and I would have to look at my bookmarks I have it bookmarked as to which have been the most helpful. Our division of labor has been kind of interesting we have been able to use we have been able to use a group of PLCs and we have been able to use a thematic unit writing team and we have been able to recruit people who want to do this work outside or who are passionate about this work more so than just the average teacher you know there's different seasons in life we have parents of young children who teach with us we have people close to retirement there's just all different walks and so we have been able to tap our resources and get the people who are passionate about OER and are passionate about our curriculum and thematic units and write this write these units for us but it's definitely been you know we've had everyone on board because you just can't tackle a task this big and not have buy-in from everyone and so that's been that has been very very difficult so will we be open that's our hope we definitely hope that we will be open and we definitely hope that we will be sharing our materials with others we have created a thematic units summit where we will be discussing different we'll have different sessions and that summit will be with two other districts in the st louis area uh ladoo and uh rockwood rockwood school district and parkway and so the three of us will get together and we will have a thematic unit summit in july we have had i saw question come up about homeschool groups have i had homeschool groups contact us we have not but man that would just be actually phenomenal because all of the resources we have could be used given that we don't have a textbook we do have parents that will say okay now that you don't have a textbook how do i help my kid how do i help them study and so we have had to kind of retrain parents and retrain our teachers or reframe how they say things you know our vocab lists are all encompassing our can-do statements our ipas and we use those as our building blocks of our curriculum and we guide all of our parents and students to those um let's see if so what kind of feedback did they give after using it okay so um we yes so homeschool i we have not yet had any groups ask for our materials but i would welcome that i think that would be great if they could and um and so yes now the parkway school district does use we use our own curriculum we will not be adopting a new text this year i i think there is a very very very small group of teachers in my district who would like to potentially still have a textbook as a resource and we're not saying that a textbook is a dirty ugly word um however it's just that they become outdated the materials aren't authentic you can find so many great authentic materials on oer and with coral and so there's just so many great things out there pinterest has been a huge help to our teachers and um you know if it comes down the line that there is a textbook that supports our curriculum then we will definitely look at investing the money in those resources however right now um our teachers are saying you know what i've taught with it i've taught without a textbook this whole year i haven't missed it i haven't needed it um i i don't find them worthy and why spend all this money on them when they become outdated so quickly so we can definitely keep up with the times and keep up with our student needs much better using oer then the coolest part is that um i have been looking at the tel framework and i will be at tel collab this july um uh july 24th through 26th in austin i'm so excited and um coral coral is doing um some fabulous things uh hosting the event and i'm so excited to come and learn from this conference and so i'll be interested to see if anyone there will be um or if anyone from the webinar will be there too um okay so from joshua given the digital nature of many oer have you encountered any technology technology related hurdles issues in your school district either for students and or if one language structures okay through the process yes that's a great question joshua so one of the problems that we have noticed is that um infographics and such that we pull are blurry or they're too small or the print is too small we can't make it bigger and so next year um we are going to be piloting level two thematically and that group of teachers has been promised a class set of chromebooks for each of their classrooms we are also in our middle schools going one to one for chromebooks so we are excited that we will not have some of those technological hurdle hurdles and um and i think that that's that's going to be a really cool thing that's going to be very powerful to incorporate technology with oer and with our students and our faculty so i think my time's up and i appreciate you listening and i can't wait to hear from the other speakers thank you so much meg and that was terrific and um thanks to all the people who've sent in questions i like how this is much more um spontaneous i'm glad that we were able to date we were planning on taking some of the questions at the end but you know questions arise as you're speaking so thanks very very much so let's move on to our next group of speakers from george mason university alexia sonia and colleen and again they're coming from the spanish department and they also have a really ambitious kind of oer project so i'll turn it over to the three of them hi so i'm colleen sweet i'm a teacher in the spanish program and also the undergraduate advisor here at george mason university for the department of modern and classical languages and i'm going to be presenting lisa's slide today um which kind of talks about what led us to the creation of oer material someone inspired us to start this project one of the things that we found was it was very similar to what to the experience that mecan described with trying to find textbooks that fit our curriculum um specifically we were looking for textbooks that were appropriate for our first level of courses in the sequence for the spanish minors and spanish majors and we have about 50 spanish majors about 75 spanish minors um and um several students to take our basic language um basic uh 100 200 level spanish courses at mason and when we did our search for textbooks we found that several just didn't fit with what we did students to be able to do to be successful in our spanish program so the textbooks lacked cultural content that was interesting that was up to date um that you know helped them develop critical literacy skills and critical and a critical approach to cultural studies um in order to be able to be successful in the advanced level courses in writing and stylistics linguistics and cultural latinic studies that they would be taking later on also the textbooks that we did find were prohibitively expensive for our students and we just in field was worth it to adopt the textbook that um that wasn't going to fit our needs and that was going to be so expensive for our students um so we started reviewing existing oer for the spanish classroom and we found a lot of resources we found few that were appropriate for our specific course sequences um so we didn't find enough resources that were preparing cultural readings and a critical approach to cultural content with grammar vocabulary review what we try to do in these courses is address culture um while also helping students improve their proficiency in reading writing speaking and listening so grammar is um and uh structure and vocabulary is approached in context um so we applied for and rewarded a mason 4va grant to develop oer to replace the textbooks that we would have been using instead of inducting textbooks in fall 2016 we started working on the materials so now i'm going to turn things over to sun yeah i was going to talk to you a little bit more about what the experience of creative materials was like yeah i will start saying stop criticizing start working right so and our collaborative work that also we can call it co-creative work has uh three important uh points in the foundation we can say that our co-creative work rests on three main pillars first our intrinsic motivation and our pedagogical experience second our diverse academic training and teaching goals that find common ground in the materials we create for our students and the unique readings envisioned as open educational and resources of motivation those readings are the materials that uh we created we started creating writing uh for our students and um that motivation in lisa's words is a motivation to gain new knowledge on the experiences of spanish speakers with whom we share the americas in alexia's words that motivation is to embark on a journey of discovery and appreciation for another language and its culture this motivation in colline words is a motivation to continue on their spanish studies and develop their critical thinking skills and on my own words that motivation is to appreciate the linguistic richness of spanish language that exists both outside of the united states and within this country and if this is like of your attention probably the picture is doing its job at it does in one of the lessons of our oer project we can we created so far uh things to this co-created work as you can see in this main map two groups of uh lessons the first group that corresponds to span 305 and it's uh we have there five lessons and for span 36 we created four lessons um let me just take a moment to talk a little bit about lesson four as an example of the other lessons lesson four that is the title is music and dictatorship in latin america has several sections we created pre-reading activities then we have the the reading per se which has several sections and of course a biography then after that reading we have a vocabulary list and post-reading activities everything was created for us for this team and as an example of those exercises if you want to explore later uh we put the vocabulary in using the quizlet platform and we do more or less the same instructor that you have seen here with this lesson four for every lesson and uh this was um and uh my colleague Colleen will talk a little bit about what experience is in classroom using these materials thank you Sonia so yes i kind of joined the team a little bit later um in fall 2016 i just happened to be assigned the the spanish 305 course to just give you a little bit more context about these courses with the spanish and context courses i mentioned before they're the first courses students take in the minor and major um and so the idea is students take the first part of the sequence in the fall the second part of the sequence in the spring um we have a lot of diversity here at george mason university in in all of our classes and in our spanish classes we have you know a combination of students who come in as freshmen who took ap spanish scored an appropriate score on the ap exam and start at the 300 level to students who are junior seniors who follow the whole sequence from 100 level um there's a lot of diversity in age ranges as well from 17 year olds to people over their 70s um and we also have a good mix of students who are learning spanish as a foreign language and who are learning spanish as heritage learners or heritage speakers of the language so there is no real typical 305 306 39 students um ideally the students who take this class would be students who are taking spanish as a foreign language because we have a curriculum in place for heritage learners but that's not always the case the neighbor students work um or have families and so they have to take the classes at the at the schedule that is appropriate for them so that means that our resources have to kind of address a range of fluency levels um and also be relevant to people from a lot of wide range of experiences um another challenge that i thought about when i was preparing to teach with these oer materials was um my approach to technology in the classroom and um what was the level of digital literacy that my students had how comfortable am i with technology and also how comfortable am i going to be letting them use devices in the classroom so in our case we used blackboard platform to share our oer materials with our students and that's a technology that all students at mason are pretty familiar with and use pretty regularly so it certainly made it helpful but it meant having to be open to letting students access their devices all the time in class so i had to kind of rethink how i was going to approach that um so some of the strategies that i tried to use to address these challenges was to first of all tell students from the beginning that um our text were going to be oer materials and to communicate with them from the syllabus and from the first day of class what my expectations were going to be um for how they could prepare for class we also took some time to talk about accessing devices and using technology in class and what was appropriate what was inappropriate and also what kind of resources are good resources for students of spanish what's a good dictionary why you have to um you know stay away from babel fish and use word reference instead for example um and so i think that was really helpful i also tried to model that using those resources in class when it came up another thing that was really helpful was that the format for the readings were very consistent so students once they got used to the first reading and the second reading they knew what was expected of them how to prepare vocabulary how to read how to do the questions one thing that we tried to do to incorporate uh practice of grammatical accuracy was and also to continue the conversation about culture because it's one of the advantages we have with students with such a wide range of experiences in our classes is um was creating um engaging expansion activities for students so they could do research outside of class about a part of the topic that was particularly interesting to them and then come back into class and share that so one example was um an oral homework assignment they had to do for the the lesson four that sonia explained to you earlier and so i asked students to research a song that corresponded to a certain type of political or social context so it didn't necessarily have to be a song about an intermittent context of a to uh dictatorship or totalitarian regime which was the the unit we were covering but songs that kind of addressed different topics related to like social protest and it was really interesting to see what the students brought in um they were interested in songs about uh the cost of education in spanish-speaking countries for example a lot of them brought in songs by Juanes um and all the different themes that he covers so um it gave them a chance to practice using their spanish to do a little bit of research and also kind of talk about something that they like which um helped them have a positive attitude when it came to having to talk in front of the class um another thing that i think was really helpful was that i had access to technology enhanced classrooms so i had a computer and a projector and a screen and that and i never had any issues with technology um and so that really helped me use these resources successfully and finally we were always able to kind of check back in with each other and talk about our experiences so although i hadn't been involved in the original creation of the materials i was able to come back to Sonja and to Alexia and talk to them about what i tried to do how i tried to teach the unit or like how we did the vocabulary and share with them some of the the activities that worked really well so um i'm gonna now turn things over to Alexia who's going to talk to you a little bit more about the lessons we've learned from our experience with this project thank you Colleen as my colleagues have just described going OER redefines the learning and teaching experience the entire process is pedagogically enlightening and motivating it provides the opportunity to approach material in an engaging manner for a team redesigning and teaching two content-based upper-level Spanish courses with OER has been an enriching experience from which we have drawn the following recommendations that you have on the two last PowerPoint slides before going OER we believe that it is crucial to get some training on the best practices of using OER and digital resources our universities librarians and Mason publishing group did guide us through part of the process also attending professional development events such as conferences seminars workshops training sessions or panel discussions is a great way to gain insights and new skills gather innovative ideas and tips exchange ideas meet peers working on similar projects etc such events can also be highly motivating and inspiring um my colleague Sonia had the opportunity of participating in the two day career workshop offered last summer um for um teachers of heritage learners of Spanish and it provided her a valuable no it provided her valuable knowledge for using OER in her courses as well as new approaches in teaching Spanish for heritage speakers and most importantly motivated her in taking an active role in our course redesign project it is also crucial to understand what you're allowed to do according to the OER copyright many resources will be licensed with creative comments but be aware that not all of them can be reused and mixed if you're not familiar with the uh this copyright licensing licenses on the creative comments website you'll find information regarding the six different types of licenses uh as Megan said mentioned in her presentation there is a plethora of open educational resources available online and um they may be overwhelming um probably you will not have trouble locating them but you may have a hard time evaluating them it is critical to evaluate them for accuracy and quality and for that you can use the achieve OER OER rubrics and the link is on the powerpoint presentation remember quality does matter we also recommend you to opt for gradual transition to OER you could start by incorporating your course a few OER such as audio recordings podcast full digital text images interactive activities or slideshows before going fully OER also in reusing revising remixing or creating OER keep in mind that the um keep in mind the needs and abilities of your prospective students you should therefore maintain clear goals and expect expectations as you do for any other courses it is known that variety adds spice to teaching and learning hence strive for diversity by incorporating OER in a variety in a variety of formats for example such as the ones I have mentioned a few seconds ago also something that is very important reflect and reflect on and measure the impact of your OER courses and engagement performance achievement and success of your of your students after each class session think about what went well what can be improved and what are the main takeaways from each activity complementary in class do not wait until the end of the semester for your students to evaluate your OER courses and give feedback early course evaluations and midterm evaluations to assess the material the method of delivery and so on have many benefits they can let you know if you need to make adjustments to your courses and students feel also empowered to help design their own educational process um also very important look for support from others from for example your colleagues other educate educators working with OER your college our university or school librarians can be extremely supportive in your endeavors why not work in collaboration with colleagues or colleague or colleague and your students can be a tremendous source for ideas and improvement listen to them ask them for continuous feedback make them part of the process consider empowering them to create content as well on my slide my last recommendation is to consider publishing the material you have created um or the OER you have revised or remixed um I have listed two websites where you can do that um and by doing so you will help in maximizing the use and availability of your open education educational materials enhance your reputation as an educator and most importantly be part of the OER social responsibility of providing education for all so I hope you will all consider taking part of the OER initiative it will give you more freedom to create and or redesign your courses put towards your creativity um also increase your students engagement and motivation and last but not least be part of the OER initiative thank you guys so much the entire team at George Mason University and just like we did with Megan I want to give people a chance to write questions what's on your mind as you've heard them describe their process of creating materials for their students what kinds of issues did they encounter and we have a first question Pilar is asking are your materials available to everyone okay so you've started with your you've created all these great materials but and they are available to students at George Mason but are you putting them on the internet and sharing them well as Colleen stated for the moment we placed everything on blackboard but first so on we'll be planning we're planning to do so during summer so yeah we wanted to test it out first and see how it worked in two semesters and then we will be making it available in 2007 yeah that's that's probably a reasonable way to go about this play around with it at your own institution and then share it um I wanted to kind of ask the group then uh Megan said that many of her teachers felt that felt that this was kind of a vulnerable activity or they felt like it was face threatening to create materials and share it with your colleagues did any of you have those kinds of experiences did you feel like um you were a little bit reticent you didn't want to share with other people Sonia says that she's very brave no no not at all I think we all really I'm you know for the creation of materials I think people drew on their expertise that they already had so adjusting social linguistic diversity in the OER text that Sonia last created the first lesson one for 305 for example and we all have a diverse range of experiences so we all just drew on what we already know um and so you know yeah that I mean certainly having teamwork having collaborators that you get along with and you're working together on something that probably reduces the feelings of vulnerability and saving face and all of that so that's an important point yeah and that we are brave remember yes you are brave I mean everybody's brave to to actually tackle this and to do it themselves and I think um sometimes the what I was trying to open with at the beginning was that these issues are making us braver because sometimes we don't really have other alternatives we're looking for we're creating the alternatives ourselves because they're the good ones aren't out there so you have to be brave and you have to just do it yeah yeah so here's a question um Tracy is asking will you be creating OER for other levels for lower level courses so in the different levels I mean that's all have other people other colleagues at George Mason who teach different levels are they going to take take over your ideas and expand this in the curriculum what hopefully and this is what we may do in the future so not yet but hopefully soon um I think the level 300 400 level courses go without textbook already anyway um but for the 100 to 200 level it's hopefully sometimes well that's a good point a lot of the lower level language courses typically have an adopted textbook created by commercial publishers and then in higher ed when they take so-called content courses professors are much more adapt they're used to choosing their own materials or creating something on on a blackboard or canvas or whatever the LMS is but they're not used to sharing them with the world so that's a difference I mean what we see from at the very beginning of of this webinar when I asked people to fill out just a little bit of information it's clear that people are creating materials all teachers create lesson plans and activities and quizzes and so forth but they don't go to the next step and I think that's sharing and Megan said something I wrote it down she called it the boomerang effect what you give out to the world comes back to you and sometimes it comes back to you and it's better so you have an idea um that you work you've worked out with your classroom and then you share it with somebody who gets inspired and can add on something and it comes back to you so I think that people in upper level content courses are used to creating their class but they don't share and that's really what we're trying to get people to do talk about sharing during open education week so yeah um so I'm talking just to kind of tap dance here to see that there are more questions in the chat room I see people are typing any other I will say as people are typing their questions I wanted to make a comment I thought it was really nice um that you were as part of your OER you were actually embedding certain kinds of practices what what we would call an open educational practice for example you gave the the the example of having your students as part of the lesson search for music that responds that that is itself a kind of um I don't know a social protest so you empower the students to use a digital resources in a new way and you incorporate the actual practice of a google search into your materials I thought that was a terrific because the whole point of creating OERs is we're we're trying to to oblige our students to teach our students by example so I thought that was a terrific terrific idea you're modeling open educational practices so in every and actual and everybody's talking about how we want to teach languages and promote 21st century foreign language skills so that's great you can do that really well with OER I think that's one one thing that's important is encouraging students to be critical readers of digital resources and to know what makes a good digital resource especially when it's a resource that's in the language that they're learning so I think that was one thing that we this is important to me because since I started teaching from today there's so many more resources dual lingua and so many online dictionaries and translators and so many things but um I just kind of wanted to help them learn to be critical readers of or receivers of those kind of resources too we haven't mentioned that in our case that we have a heavy teaching law doing this kind of activity gave us the opportunity to combine teaching and research so it's fantastic because we are doing we are working on our two passions and just with the same material yeah that's a very important point and again coming back to this idea about embedding open educational practices 21st century skills your your example of you know we know that they're going to be using online translators babel fish or whatever um but they have to be shown explicitly in the materials or through your teaching what the limitations of those translators are and what the alternatives to those translators are just as you mentioned it's it would be better for them to go to word reference and here is how you use word reference so you can build all that right into your lessons themselves that's just so great okay we have a couple questions Carl I see there's a question about um someone being conflicted about writing curriculum this summer and also in the middle of a textbook adoption process and I have some advice on that I really think that you have to go with your gut and you have to decide what your objectives are for your students what you would like them to be able to do what you're setting out to do and then once you've established that and you you have a game plan you you know what you you know want them to accomplish then I think you can decide okay from here will a textbook support that do I and you know you can research has the textbook been supportive of that or would a textbook be supportive of that and if it if it doesn't then please don't change your curriculum to fit the mold of a textbook I think a far too often people do that there's just such a plethora of information out there with OER that makes um you know your curriculum just so much stronger so much better and and really on the best track for kids so I think that that's the best advice I could give and finally um we have time for one question this question comes from Tracy and she says what's her comment but she says I like that you teach students about good OER and copyright permissions um both of you mentioned quickly and passing copyright so a lot of people I want to kind of get the speaker's reactions to this a lot of people are you know a little bit nervous to jump on the OER bandwagon because they feel like they don't know much about copyright what have you learned I just if you could say a couple of words what what are some of the issues that you've encountered about copyright we certainly still are novice and so we are learning as we go and we have a wonderful um innovation team in our district that helps us navigate those tricky situations and we have just learned that you know we we take it and we tweak it and we make it our own and as long as we're using it for educational use in our classroom we try to be very careful with that walking a fine line as educators not to step on anyone's toes for copyright you know and we do we even teach our kids that here from seventh grade on you know citing resources making sure that they know how to um uh what's the word discriminate against a good resource and a bad resource we we're doing that I know that the ladies at George Mason said the same thing we we're doing the same you know in secondary education at a very early age so hopefully by the time they get to them they can um you know differentiate a good a a good resource and a bad resource also the you and your team did a great job at the workshop of this summer last summer that I attended so it was just two days but I think I what I learned using OER specifically for heritage and my heritage classes but anyways it's applied it applies for all classes I think it was enough to have a clear idea what is open and what the restrictions are and so I appreciate that and and I came here and I shared all what I learned um there that's great that's a wonderful story that's wonderful to hear so I think you also said something important and that is you you may be a novice but that doesn't mean that you have to stop and wait until you become an expert you can still create and a little bit of knowledge can go a long way so and if you do have a question there are plenty of people in the open education movement either at creative commons or here at coral who will help you answer those questions as they arise because there are lots of context there are so many contexts that that we kind of take them as they come so um I want to thank everybody but I uh for for your stories and and it's really quite inspiring that you're actually doing what we've been talking about here at coral and I want us to end now by um asking you to fill out a quick survey it's actually very important for us because as I said at the at the beginning we are federally funded and as part of our uh the the regulations of the federal government we have to show them who attended and what they felt and so if we could just ask you for a couple of minutes to fill it out it's really very brief so thanks again to the speakers thank you all all of our participants we had a really about 39 40 participants great crowd and please fill out our survey and come to visit our website coral and you're going to find more information about much of the um issues and the ideas that we're talked about today thank you very much thank you thank you thank you bye bye everybody