 All right, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast, we usually broadcast the show every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. Today it's Tuesday that we're doing a special episode because tomorrow is the Veterans Day holiday here in the United States so we are, as a state agency, we're closed so today's Tuesday but normally we're on Wednesdays, 99% of the time. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to watch so if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays or whenever we broadcast that's fine you can always go to our archives and see all of those so and I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our archives. For anybody here with us today, I know we had a lot of people that registered not from Nebraska. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, similar to the state library and other states. So we provide services to all types of libraries in Nebraska so on our shows or upcoming shows in our archives you'll find topics that just pretty much run the gamut of anything library related. This is for publics, K-12, academics, historical societies, archives, really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries, any types of libraries. Something libraries are doing, something cool we think they could be doing. We sometimes have a Nebraska Library Commission staff come in and talk about specific things that are we're offering here in Nebraska. We also bring in guest speakers from all across the state in the country and that's what we have with us today and we'll get into today's show. In just a second, I am going to, before we get into today's show, I'm going to pop over to our Library Commission website. I've been doing this every week just to remind people here in Nebraska and across the country. We are still in the height and getting worse of the COVID-19 pandemic. And here at the Library Commission, we are attempting to gather resources and information to help our libraries deal with it, how they want to be open, closed, whatever they are doing in their libraries. With a link that's pinned here to the top of our webpage, always will be at the top above any of our other posts about pandemic resources we have gathered. And we are attempting to keep a listing of Nebraska libraries, who's open, who's closed, who's re-closed because things have gotten worse and they had to close up again. So we're keeping a list there, just Nebraska libraries. If you're in Nebraska Library, let us know if we need to update your info there. Just show you here the page we have here. Four of my online libraries can use. You have some maps. And then you have this link here that goes to resources. Things you can use in your library to help your patrons with unemployment, financial help. What do I do with my kids, homeschooling, et cetera, et cetera. But the second link here I want to highlight is specifically for libraries. So things here, we are just gathering resources, things to help you out with. How do I close? How do I reopen? What should I be doing? Special information for school libraries. This is specific as far as meetings. This is specific to Nebraska. Or what our state statutes are. Check your own state to see what you can do for meetings if you need to have open meetings. Any other resources you've gathered? We're always updating this page. We have staff that are seeing what's going on out there. Updated information about COVID-19, about what libraries, archives can do. So we're always adding to this page. So please do keep an eye on it. It's open to anyone to use, of course. Some of the information is Nebraska-specific. So be careful with what you look at here. But it could be good information for anybody. If you're not in Nebraska, check with your state library or your state library association. They may be doing the same thing for you. So always just reminding people of that every week. So now let's get into this week's Encompass Live. First, I am going to switch presentation to you, Britt. So we can get your slides up. So you should see that. Awesome. All right. So today we are talking about learning German, which I don't know anything about. So hopefully I'll learn something. I don't know. My director actually said something to me this morning in a meeting when I was leaving. And I'm like, sure, I don't know what that is, but let's find out. But it's more about creating an open educational resource. This is something very useful to people who are, as we are a lot today, not able to get into our usual coursework. German language learning. So I'm just going to pass it over to you guys to take it away and introduce yourself and tell us what you've done here. It was a great resource. All right. Hi. My name is Luanne Trevier. I use she, her pronouns. And I'm the Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communications Librarian at McAllister College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Today we're going to jump right into a story about Grenzenlos Deutsch and Open Educational Resource Curriculum. We're going to make a few assumptions like that you're familiar with the concept of open educational resources, but we'll pause throughout the session to take questions and there will be time for questions at the end. So no worries if you're not really familiar with that term. We'll start out with the point where the seed for this idea was planted. Take you through some of the decisions and making that curriculum more inclusive. Throw in a few details on the creation process for more of the techie types and include a snapshot of the numerous collaborators that have supported this project. I am just one of the many hands that has worked on and touched this project. So I'll hand it over to Britt. Hi, everyone. Thanks, Christa, for inviting us to be here. We're really excited to present to you all today. My name is Britt Abel. I use she, her, her pronouns. I'm a faculty member in German Studies at McAllister College in St. Paul, Minnesota. I also serve as the director of writing there. But I'm here today because I'm one of the co-PIs and co-lead authors of Grenzenlos Deutsch. Before we get started though, we wanted to just acknowledge that Luanne and I are both at McAllister College. And we'd like to take a moment to honor the fact that McAllister College sits on Dakota land. It's the ancestral homeland of the Dakota people who were forcibly exiled from the land because of aggressive and persistent settler colonialism. So we want to make this acknowledgment to honor the Dakota people, ancestors, and descendants, as well as the land itself. We'll take just a second. I just want to let that sit with us for a minute before we move on. So I thought I'd begin telling you the story of how my current project began. So Grenzenlos Deutsch, which means German without borders, is an open access no cost curriculum for use in the first year German classroom. This project aspires to provide in a collaborative format an inclusive curriculum containing queered material and material that reflects the diversity of class, race, gender, and ethnicity of our students. Origin story. Yes, it is indeed Facebook. So as you can see, March 11, 2015, there was this Facebook post. You see a bunch of likes and a bunch of comments in there. That was my like. There's some of a bunch of my comments in there. But I wanted to explain to you kind of what happened in the two weeks prior to this Facebook post. There were some other things that were going on in my brain. So first of all, there was a lunchtime talk at McAllister College's DeWitt Wallace Library where Luanne works. And this was a talk about open textbooks with the director, the then director of the library, Terry Fishel and Ron Jocelyn, who was also an employee at the library and an OER expert. This is an image from from their slides. So I went to that talk the very same week. I attended the Central States College on the teaching of foreign languages, the friendly conference, they say. And I went to a panel on heteronormativity in language classrooms. This was a panel that was organized by my friend and colleague, Gizolda Mula. And we talked a lot about heteronormativity in the language classroom and kind of shared stories about our attempts to diversify the language curriculum. At the time, I was kind of shocked to hear that there were textbook authors who had written gay characters into textbooks and those characters were taken out because the publishers were thinking about how to publish to the greatest variety of institutions. But that felt really discouraging to me. These were both events, this lunchtime talk about OER and this talk about heteronormativity in the language class. They were both events that that made me think hard about the materials I use in my classroom. And, you know, I've been thinking about this for a while, but this kind of confluence of events made me think a little bit harder about it. So you have to understand that at the time I was using what I think is the best German textbook out there. There is so much that I like about it. It uses wonderful pictures. It introduces vocabulary with pictures and it has these fun comics like this one as a prompt for students to kind of use their narrative skills to tell a story. Here's a nice little picture story it's called about the circus. And perhaps you can see that this young boy Michel Pusch goes to the circus. He's sitting in the audience and built in the second picture. You see the little arrow where he's sitting in the audience. And there are all the wonderful things at the circus. And there's this beautiful tightrope walker and he just can't stop thinking about her in school. He can't do his work and after school he runs away to the circus. His plan is to work for the circus and to marry the tightrope walker. And so he feeds the horses and the elephants. He eventually, I always laugh at this, a couple of days later, his parents come and pick him up on like a couple of days. And he's sad and he has to go back to work and he always thinks of the beautiful tightrope walker. So this is a funny little story and there are so many of these. I love the images but I'll tell you what I don't like. I don't like that pretty much the central narrative arc of this textbook is a heterosexual love story and it's often with male identified characters and young boys often as the subjects and girls as the objects. This is one example of many. And it explains why an additive approach can't fix what's wrong with this textbook. I can't just throw in, this is how you say partner. This is how you talk about the plural of fathers and the plural of mothers for students with queer parents, right? The central narrative of this textbook is a heterosexual love story. And at my institution, I often felt like I had to apologize for the materials I was teaching with. I also, you know, I did things in class to kind of counteract this narrative but there is still the fact that this is what the textbook was selling us basically. And selling us indeed it was because there's also the cost, right? We all know that textbooks are really expensive and this textbook gets reissued every three years, often without substantive changes but new page numbers, right? And the cost has become a bigger and bigger issue for my students and more and more students were asking for a way around it. So this now brings me back to Facebook and yes, so this project was born out of a Facebook grant but it was also born out of all these other things that were going on in my mind when I came to Facebook and when I saw this post. So Brenda posted her frustrations about heteronormativity and sexism in language textbooks and German textbooks in particular. Dr. Amy Young chimed in as did I and the Facebook thread actually led to a more serious discussion about writing a textbook. And Amy Young and I decided we were going to do this and we were going to do it as an open educational resource as something for free. So we started out thinking really about how we might build a more inclusive curriculum. We were keenly aware of the disconnect. I should advance my slides there, sorry. We were keenly aware of the disconnect between what our students experience in their daily lives and what's depicted in the learning materials that we bring into our classrooms. So we're hoping to provide materials that represent both our students lives and lives in German speaking countries in a more diverse way. Another goal we had was sustainability. We wanted specific content on sustainability in the environment and also on social sustainability. And we wanted a project that provides kind of sustainable, in other words, free materials for students and a sustainable model for us as we were doing this work. So this project has been five years in the making, but I'm piloting it now and I'm now working with materials I don't have to apologize for. And we actually have six institutions piloting across the country. So we'll talk about that in a minute. But first, I'm just going to show you a couple of examples about our attempt to diversify the curriculum before Luann kind of talks about some of the details for the project. So first of all, we started out, as I said, wanting more diversity around gender and sexuality. So we have queer characters in our textbook. They exist narratively throughout the curriculum and they talk about their partners. We have images as you can see here on the slide. We have lessons on so-called patchwork families, non-traditional families. We have lessons on Vienna pride on gender and sex. Here you can see in the upper right corner that we use the pride parade to teach colors in the very beginning unit. You got every color you need to teach right there in that image. We also have illustrations with gender non-conforming and non-binary folks. And we introduce, for example here, how to talk about pronouns and how to introduce your pronouns. We have cultural notes about gender-friendly, gender-inclusive language that we then also model in the examples throughout. Where I teach, there's a demand for language to represent gender non-conforming people and students so it's nice to have this built into the curriculum. We are also trying to be trying to complicate the notion of the German moving away from kind of this racialized identity of the German. We interview some non-native speakers. There are many living in the German speaking world and we feel like it's important to include non-native speakers because students will interact with them when they are in Germany or Austria or Switzerland. And I'll just say as a side note, some curricula just say we're only having native speakers. There's something about the notion of what constitutes good German. So there are some people who, as they're writing, they really want only native speakers producing the language. But we decided we wanted to think about this differently. Also, there are many curricula that are Germanocentric and we have a lot about Austria in this curriculum. Not so much about Switzerland right now. We would like to get that in there so we'll see how that works. So we're thinking about diversity of Germans and in a similar way, a diversity of language. Again, we're including non-native speakers with level appropriate proficiency. They're woven into the fabric of the curriculum just to reinforce this idea of a multicultural society. We also talk about and include regional differences in languages. So these are some examples here where we're presenting kind of different terms that are used in Austria than in Germany. We have a little cultural section here about some of the words related to house cleaning and how they're different in Germany and Austria. In other words, we wanted an explicit discussion of German as a Pluricentric language and we have that in several of the cultural sections and in our vocabulary lists. Finally, we were also thinking about the diversity of ability, both in terms of representation and in terms of practice. So thinking first about representation, we have illustrations with people of different abilities throughout the curriculum. Ability and accessibility come up in various different lessons throughout. So the image of the woman here on the left, this is from an interview that we use in our housing unit. She discussed in a video interview her accessible communal housing situation and the steps that she and her roommates went through to ensure that the space would be accessible for everyone as some of the members of our housing community rely on wheelchairs. There are also explicit lessons on disability and accessibility in our social justice module and these lessons provide vocabulary for students, not only to understand the world around them but also to advocate for themselves as necessary. So you see here a little image of a vocabulary section where students learn the word for sign language. We were also thinking from the start about best practices for ADA compliance for web authoring and we worked with a consultant to help with some of these decisions like how to make sure the color contrast and the fonts were accessible and readable. The question of accessibility played a role in our decisions about the platform and the tools that we use for the curriculum which Luanne will talk about in just a minute and as you can see here we were careful to include alternative descriptions for images as well. Our big debate and I think it's still an ongoing debate is about the videos. We have not captioned all of our videos because the videos are used for listening practice and we're worried for that hearing students if they have the subtitles they won't practice their listening skills as well and so we have honestly been struggling what to do about this and we have complete transcripts of all the videos that we provide to our instructors and make available to people who need them and we're still thinking about this. I mean ideally we might even have like two sets of videos one with captions and one without. We'll have to see about whether that's feasible from a workload perspective. It's a decision that doesn't sit comfortably with me I'll be honest. At the same time I strongly feel that students need to practice listening skills and I worry about that so this might be something that we can talk about in our Q&A session. But we are going to move on to talk more about the details of the platform and things like that I wanted to just pause for a minute. Krista are there any questions that have come in so far? Let's see yeah if anybody has any questions let me open up the box here. Nobody's typed anything while they're listening to you that's usually how this goes though they did more time listening which is great. If anybody does have any questions go ahead and type into the questions section of your go-to-webinar interface. I know some people came in a little late I noticed people popping in after we'd already started so if you're wondering anything from the beginning you definitely ask about that. Nobody had any questions as you were typing or talking as I said. I'll give a few seconds for anybody who doesn't want to get anything out there. But I just want to say I think it's having so many options in this textbook is something that people don't realize it's kind of a subconscious thing that you're just learning the language you know going to that very first cartoon you had the pictures are no big deal it's just I'm trying to learn the language I'd kind of only half half even pay attention to what the pictures are I'm looking at because it's just I did learn this word but that all matters it's there in the back of your head I mean and it comes from wherever you are looking at it from what I looked at that cartoon myself my thinking was this is some scary stalker feeling stories what I'm seeing here he doesn't know her he's just all he's in is seeing her he thinks she's pretty and now she's he's gonna get a job and who knows what would happen if he stuck around and his parents did not drag him away and like I didn't like that story at all no that's not cool. I think you you have the same reaction that most of my students have so yep. All right Louie. We do have a question though that I think you may have mentioned it but it's more of a kind of a big picture kind of question why do you feel showing alternative lifestyles in learning a language is important that's kind of like a big well I would say it is so it's only an alternative lifestyle to people who aren't living it right I mean that what what happens in language classes is that we start with the very basic things we start talking about ourselves and really what we want is for students to be able to talk about themselves at the very beginning right we start out with lots of conversations about this is me this is my family this is what I eat this is what I like this is what I don't like this is what I do um tell you learn the words yeah I learned French my name is so and so I live that I go to wherever yeah so yeah and so we want to have we want to make sure that students can describe their own lives and can describe the lives of the people that they see around them and for many of my students this is important I I had a student who started at McAllister who had to write in beginning German about her family and she went and looked up the plural form of mother so she could talk about her two mothers and the instructor didn't know about this and corrected it right like oh that's not right but it actually was right right so we need to be thinking about how can we provide the language that that students need to describe themselves but also to describe the world in which they inhabit and the world in which they live has a huge variety of types of family constructions um and so you know it's also similar in our food unit we talk about veganism and re and and dietary restrictions and allergies um and reasons why people choose to eat in certain ways be they religious or ethical or environmental um we feel like it's important that food is not a neutral topic right it it can be loaded and it says a lot more about about ourselves and our identities so we want to make sure that that language is available for students makes it all right um right no like there's any other oh just thank you for your answer thank you very much yes I hope that was satisfying um I can imagine too as you're talking about I was thinking that it can make it um and it makes some weird less distracting when there is just so many we know the world's got all of these different permutations of people and who they are and what they do and if it's just in there as well this is you know as a no-brainer it's like well of course we're going to show all sorts of different um ethnicities or um genders or whatever and it's just in there as a it is it it's just naturally there no big deal it's less distracting when you have like that story when I was looking at that I'm supposed to be learning the language but now I'm annoyed about the story and if it's just here's all the different things around there and it's just normal and that takes away the distraction from well why is it about this why is why am I not seeing someone like the girl in the drawing with the prosthetic leg and things like that you know showing that these are all just how it is and we're just here for the language and it's language is going to be about all these things exactly you can focus on I'm just here for the language and all this distraction of how terrible this textbook is right right yeah and I just want to say again it's a great textbook in many ways but there's this underlying problem yeah exactly I guess the one other thing I want to just point out is that um both the modern languages association MLA and the american psychological association the APA have recently changed their style guides to include the singular they right so instead in fact it is now preferred instead of writing about the student he she right he or she it's now the student they if you don't know the gender of the student this is how our language is evolving and it's evolving in ways that really makes sense so partially too we want to be able to talk about what does that look like in german what what are the alternatives in german given that our students are coming from a context in which this this is very common right and for example luan and I both introduced ourselves with our pronouns the way we the way we typically do at our institution so that we're not making assumptions about gender identity yeah awesome all right I'll let you go on to the next question all right I'll jump into a few details and it's kind of an overview but if there are more questions at the end we can dig into more of the inclusivity decisions or more of the technical kinds of decisions as people are interested yeah I'll just remind you whenever you think of a question just go ahead and type it in and we'll you know so I don't want you to forget something you might have wanted to ask about and we'll grab it when we have our um when it's next the makes sense to have a little break all right so accessibility and open source were major decision drivers in the decision of using wordpress and h5p plugins so both of these fit the bill for accessibility and open source software and also have the added benefit of easily being able to embed the videos and the h5p content one unique thing about the site is that it's actually multiple wordpress sites that have been seamlessly put together to appear as one site and so um when you go to grenzenlosdeutsch you'll see that there are multiple language levels and then for each language level there are topics and then the individual lessons within the topics that multiple sightness uh was helpful for the authors so that they each had their own individual site to log into an edit and also gave brit the super user access so she could log into each of those different sites as needed and then weave them together and then using the open source software ties into wanting to make this fully open so that others can reuse revise redistribute in different formats and without barriers the proprietary barriers we'll look at a timeline in the next slide but just to give you an idea of what kinds of learning objects are in the curriculum there are textual elements but then there are also images illustrations video audio h5p interactives and the data management plan that was created as part of getting an NEH national endowment for the humanities grant really laid the roadmap for describing what kinds of files or what kinds of objects would be used what file formats they would be in and what the long-term management would be for those different objects themselves and so thinking about making sure that the files are in open file formats that they have great interoperability for long-term storage and reuse by others and also contain the creative commons license the cc by non-commercial share like for others to revise remix reuse redistribute and retrain retain following the definition of open educational resources and content dm and digital commons repositories managed by the mccalister dwitt wallace library were identified for ongoing storage and open sharing of the learning objects themselves there are a lot of kind of project management details we can get into if people have interest in those one thing that I find interesting about the photos is that they are have subject metadata tags in both english and german so that helps in the discovery and reuse by others in the long term so we'll move on to the timeline just to give you an idea of how this process and project has evolved so as brit was saying in 2015 was the initial idea of the light bulb that went off and there was a lot of planning and around that there was an initial smaller local grant that was received and lots of planning some collecting in germany that was happening for video and photos and then in 2017 there was the major neh grant that was received and so that really got the ball rolling and from there there was workshop planning and getting the wordpress site set up and in 2018 the entire authoring team went to vienna and this is where they really workshopped and figure out how they wanted to structure this what kinds of topic areas they wanted to use and did a lot of the major collecting of videos and photos and from there on just a lot of authoring and editing of especially of the videos and brit started piloting in 2019 and then three additional institutions and now up to six institutions that are piloting the website so it's really an iterative process where they are getting feedback from the pilot institutions and the students using the textbook and making changes as they are building that third level of language the language level going through it yeah so should we take a break here or are there any questions that came in um let's see no they haven't anybody has any questions about the process definitely a type in um i do like this is i actually i love open access and open source type stuff like this because it's not in stone that it isn't like i mean i know you had shown that the original previous textbook you could get new editions of it and loosely pages or whatever but something like this being online and being able to as it's used did we do the right thing are they learning the language is is is it working and being able to just jump in there and just you know make a change to it is is awesome i think i'm a it's one of my pet things that i like and i'm glad that this is how this is going so i know this it's being tested in some university so far and i see on that timeline you still have stuff to be done next year at least until it's a final project final thing i guess is that still some work to be done um we are still um so first of all i fear with the big collection of websites like this it will never be done done it will never be off of my to-do list right um but uh yeah we are still the way the curriculum is structured is that we have um six modules which are content areas and then within each module we have three units of increasing linguistic complication increasing difficulty so for instance in my german 101 class i teach most of the unit one so i do unit one of family and friends unit one of shopping and food unit one of travel and transport and so on and then in my second semester class we do we finish up a unit one and we do a number of the unit twos um what we are still do what we the the board of authors is still doing is authoring some of the unit threes they're not quite done yet they're kind of icing on the cake with the idea that they could be used for a third semester but it could be that there is a specific topic that the students or the instructor are really it's a topic that they are very interested and invested in and they want to go into more depth um with a little bit more complexity so it builds in it's meant to be a pretty sequenced curriculum in the first units a little bit more flexible in the second and very flexible in the third so it can be used in different ways as they learn more and they realize what they might want to know more about yeah exactly and we joked it's kind of a choose your own adventure language curriculum i mean you can't do that at the beginning you got to learn kind of you know the basics first but as you progress yeah yeah nice okay uh that was doesn't look anybody has quite any questions about this section yet any other one so yeah go ahead all right so let's jump into how are we doing this and the answer is collaboration so there are multiple pieces of collaboration um multiple levels i'll start out with the level that i'm most familiar with macalester college and um several areas and offices individuals around macalester that have put in time and effort and ideas into this project so um one of the areas here is digital liberal arts and this is a group that included a postdoc in the digital liberal arts it s and other individuals and they were really integral in getting the wordpress site and other technical consultations in order at the very start also the summer faculty student research program for one summer there was a student that was collecting images and video in germany before the large workshop that came later and then in subsequent summers there were students in the studio art major that were creating the illustrations for the project and then also the library i've just been on the project for not even two years so before i arrived at macalester there was strong support from the library director terry fischl and working enthusiasm from a librarian ron joslyn uh britt mentioned them at the beginning that's where she had gone and seen a presentation about oer in general and ron wrote the grant data management plan uh he did a lot of training with the author group on things such as the creative commons licensing and platform and he was also part of the team that traveled to vienna in order to workshop and collect and create additional content and in addition there are library student employees that continue to work on editing video and britt you have another student employee that's working on photo metadata so so many hands are helping out on this yeah and um i just want to reiterate that it was the library at macalester that embraced this project first like this would not have happened without our amazing library and the staff there who saw the potential for this project and supported me not only with a cheerleading rah rah you go but also with um giving us you know giving us staff time and support for this project so um i just you know yay libraries all right um uh you know one um we have a board of authors and a board of editors and um really partially we were thinking about how to build inclusivity and diversity is the goal um it really helps to have multiple voices you know including queer and disabled folks as well as people from a variety of backgrounds actually write the lessons right so um re-recruited authors and editors from all over the world they are all people with phd's in german but who are working in different locations some inside of academia some outside of it and so we have some lovely uh just amazing people who've worked on this project who have volunteered their time for this project as well as volunteer interviews interviewees so the majority of our listening texts are our video interviews and audio interviews with people who just volunteered to spend some time talking with us and answering questions about whatever we were working on so um i will say that that was a particularly fun part of the project you don't usually meet someone and then launch into 20 questions about their apartment um and and getting them to describe all of the details but it was it was just lovely um we had an incredible interview volunteers and um as we mentioned we have six institutions piloting the curriculum right now i'm particularly particularly happy because last year we piloted we had three small liberal arts colleges piloting um and we kind of had to suspend the second part of the pilot institution because the pilot project because when we pivoted it to remote instruction it just seemed like too much for people to kind of continue to fill out forms and do surveys as well um so we've kind of restarted this year um and there's been a lot more interest oddly enough in this project an online curriculum as many people are teaching remotely um i will say that for the three of us piloting last spring switching to remote was no big deal at all we had pretty much everything we needed um and this year we have a big state school we have a community college we have a private university and three small liberal arts colleges piloting the curriculum we are collecting information twice a semester from both students and instructors about the curriculum and and hearing about how it's working for them um so as we see this is our i'm just going to look you know kind of scroll through this quickly um uh we have a board of authors and editorial board we work collaboratively we call ourselves a collaborative working group we do group decision making about the project um and so there really is this collaboration across the world with authors editors piloters students video uh interview volunteers um and our our list of of credits on the website is long indeed because we have gotten help from so many many people um as with any big projects we've learned a lot we started out with this goal of what we wanted when we started we didn't have any idea about what platform to use or how to choose that and we have just gotten help along the way um I would say there have been many specific lessons we've learned about technology about planning and workflow and tasks about unknown things that come up with projects but really um the biggest lessons learned have been about collaboration about how to kind of build this collaborative work across campus and across campuses um to gather the expertise that we needed to do this project I didn't know how to use WordPress or h5p when I started this and uh you know what now I do um but I needed to learn that from people and fortunately there were many experts who were willing to spend time teaching me there's also the time needed to coordinate across all of the moving parts um and this I think has probably been our biggest challenge um you know I have a full time job in fact I have two jobs right I have my my job in German and my job in kind of faculty development and administration um and I'm running this project on top of it um just like me everyone involved is doing other jobs as well and finding the time is is sometimes a challenge to keep things moving forward um I think we all know that with big projects um there's also a little bit of precariousness about this type of project in terms of the ability for everyone to continue to support or to contribute as planned um uh you know we've had one of my colleagues on the board of authors has had six different jobs during this project um and has relocated multiple times including across the Atlantic um uh we've and and she's the extreme case but we've had other people in similar situations um there's there is job precarity out there um and there are things that just change in our lives that um make it hard for us to continue to contribute our time and energy in the way that we would like um we've had um you know of course those family things personal issues coming up um divorces parents loss of parents loss of pets children child care issues particularly right now a house fire and you know personal life gets in the way um and what we've just learned is that as we if we work together as a group people pick up when one person can't keep going um and that is really the true value of um of collaborating in this way is uh life happens and we just all trust that we're doing our best and try and contribute in whatever way we can at any given moment so um again I would say the biggest lesson learns are our lessons that I've learned are about collaborating and about kind of trusting this group process and um at this point we've mentioned Ron Jocelyn who um passed away in 2019 yes time is a is a blur um he was so instrumental for this project um a long time um a librarian at the DeWitt Wallace Library at um at McAllister um and not only a huge cheerleader for this project but someone who worked tirelessly on it with me um to get it going and we miss him a lot so we wanted to um show this lovely picture of him and and let you all know that we are thinking of him once we are we've got about 10 minutes we're open for more questions or more conversation yeah absolutely um yes anybody have any of any questions any comments any thoughts about the presentation get that into your question section there and we can uh talk about it no problem um we have plenty of time of course uh so uh this is still as you're saying a work in progress but Ken I see you've got the Creative Commons um license there at the bottom even though this is not finished yet is this something that other people can still you know borrow and use themselves even if you guys are not finished yet yes there is enough there that you know so six institutions are piloting and have an entire year's worth of curriculum um uh so there is plenty of material there the the photos are also available um one of the things I'm loving about the H5P activities is that um Moodle is my LMS at my institution my learning management system and Moodle talks to H5P really well so the great thing about the Creative Commons licensing is that I can just download whichever H5P activities I want to use for my low stakes assessments and then just upload them directly into Moodle we have people um working with H5P.com and um and using Canvas as their LMS and working that way um and yes there are many many places using if not the entire curriculum pieces of it um it is up and available for use okay oh and the videos are all housed on a Vimeo site so there are also if people are interested in just working with videos on very specific topics that's available as well as all the photos on content dm not all the photos yet we're still photo tagging and working on uploading those but many but there are a couple thousand photos up wow yeah um so we do have a question um and you might have partially just been talking about this but maybe some more specifics um so how does a person use this without going to one of the colleges so if you're not actually a uh staff or a student at one of the colleges who is testing this out is this something that just anybody could go and use yes how would you do that if you go to uh cleanseandlose-deutsch.com it's it's a published website right uh Bluette yes it is live um if I put uh the links in the chat will people see them um yeah we can get in there and they're also linked from the session description too right I have um that um here let me I can go into the Vimeo and the content dm too yeah I'm gonna switch my screen and I'm gonna show because I have it open but I can also show everyone um this is the session page for this show and this will be when we put the recording out as well the same info and it's a link right there to the actual site which I've popped open over here so this is something that anybody can go here and start yep I don't know start with the curriculum at the beginning and yep just go through it yep you don't need an instructor to guide you through it I guess maybe is the no I mean we did really design it thinking about using it in the classroom as something that we would that we would use but um uh you know in our classrooms uh but it's also you know Christa you want to learn some German go ahead start with Vimeo and find uh Einheit Einz um uh if you click on that uh if you scroll up a little bit Christa and you click on um the curriculum button again at the top um and now you see you can go to let there is all the different lessons and each lesson has an has an expansion an Erweiterung an expansion so I typically try and teach at least most of the content from the main lesson in class and assign the expansion as as homework um although you know there's usually some stuff from the lessons as well yeah yep so it's out there for anyone to use um my team and I have been presenting at various different conferences and um and we know that there are a number of people who are pulling in certain pieces um certain lessons um as well as the institutions that are that are piloting the entire curriculum this is one thing that you know personally did kind of catch my eye as well my my brother-in-law's family is German and he actually travels regularly with my sister to Germany and Austria I have to visit friends and whatnot and I don't might be fun sometime to shock them with knowing something knowing something you could go down to lesson seven uh Christa and that's the the one with the colors and you can see that how the just the main lesson um if you if you move just to the yeah that's the expansion but the main lesson um has uh yeah has that colors picture that I that I showed um and with the image hot spot so that you can click and learn the different colors yeah yeah and this is oh and the question is there a cost or free this is all free for obviously because I'm just clicking on things here yes all free free yep that's the key to open access yeah so it's something that can both be used just by an individual might want to learn themselves or by um an actual instructor or professor or teacher somewhere who is wanting to use this as part of what they are doing as a more official curriculum in a class exactly exactly um so how what about I know you're doing German because that's what you teach is there any talk or is anyone reached out to you about any other languages using the same format I suppose maybe or um I have language learning yeah I think I mean there are a number of of um OER is out there for language learning some open textbooks that are available um I can think of a couple for Spanish um and for French um and a couple of people have reached out to me about the national endowment of the humanities um grant that we got through the it's a digital advancement grant through their office of digital humanities um and so I believe there was someone who was interested in doing something similar for Japanese and um they reached out to just talk with me about the process so um these things are um proliferating I mean I think that many people are having the experience that I had um both around cost and accessibility related to cost um and about the need for online curricula right now I think um many uh college and university libraries are are really thinking a lot about open educational resources and how to support the development of them so um I found out just this past summer that a a colleague from Canada whom I had even met once did a German uh did a German curriculum as well so we're talking to I'm I'm sending my students to her curriculum for extra practice it's it's a different type of project but I'm I'm thinking that they're that we're going to see more and more of this and I'm I'm hearing about more and more of these projects and hearing about more interest in doing it um and like you're saying the world that we're living in now and we have been for months and months so much is going online yes I mean and you said you guys went it was easy for you to transfer to do it uh my show here and Compass Live we've been doing Compass Live for over 10 years as an online webinar so yeah really nothing changed for me much um it did we used to we would previously before a pandemic we would in locally bring presenters like yourself here into the library into the commission we have meeting rooms here we had broadcast from don't do that anymore everybody's remote even our even if my own staff our own staff here is doing something there in their office I'm in my office but it is and our I know you said you think that easier a lot more people interested in it and in March April May our attendance skyrocketed because everybody was locked down librarians were looking for in for just something to do or needing their professional development or whatever and things have just gotten crazy and this is where we're going and and now that we've been into it and have so many people have settled into it more I think realizing this doesn't have to stop after this is over when everything is is you know the pandemic is is done and we are going back to our offices normal this kind of remote learning it's been going on but it can even be more um I've heard from you know we deal with a public library is doing their story times online now right through either face you know facebook or zoom or whatever and saying well this is just for now and getting responses back from parents saying we I wish we would keep doing this I can't bring my kids into the library pandemic we're not having anything to do with it just timing wise and schedule wise but my kids are now getting to attend to attend story time this way and libraries are realizing oh it's a new thing we can do and keep doing and I think there's going to be a huge change in how everything is done after this and this is one of those things that um kind of perfect timing that you're working on this particular version now yes I do want to say like I think um I think uh there is a lot of interest in in projects like this I think the online component as well as the oer component um is is pretty important um the thing I'm going to say is that funding is the biggest challenge right um if you're writing something that is free how are you going to come up with the funds to do that if you're not working with the publishing company and so um you're not charging the students for the cost of the book anymore so right right right so so so what's a sustainable model for doing this um uh and you know doing this in other areas and you know the the um NEH is really important for many many digital humanities projects um the national endowment for the arts too for funding for types these types of things but you know we're also seeing some bigger um non-for-profit institutions that are that are supporting that you know um philanthropic institutions that are supporting OER development and targeting it as a way to reduce the cost of college um and university overall and I think we're going to have to rely on things like that um I most of my team has not been paid for this work that we're doing like our expenses to go to Vienna those things are we're paid right but um uh and as the project as as the co-pi I got a pretty minimal stipend for preparing for the workshop but mostly I'm not paid for the work that I'm done for this that I've done for this um and and and there's also a you know another thing that doesn't sit quite comfortably with me is that my team is not compensated either they are committed and passionate to this project and want to do it but I think our um one of our challenges for the future is thinking about how do we come up with funding for this type of work that will be sustainable for the people who are doing it and continue to make it free for the students yeah you can't just keep tossing more work onto people and not giving them some sort of you know we all have good hearts right there's a limit yeah I think it's I think it's just going to be changing OER is because it's been around for a long time but it's getting even bigger and I think yeah everyone's just going to have to switch their thinking into how things are done at how college and you know studying is done and how learning is done that buying two three four hundred dollar textbooks is that is not sustainable there are people who are not going to college because they can't afford that and they just say well I can't afford that I'm just not going to do it at all and that's horrible yeah yeah yeah all right so we're a little after 11 o'clock that's okay we started a little after 10 central time does anybody have any um last minute desperate questions they need to ask of the winner brit you can type into your question section um I did attempt to share the link slant shared the link to um the vimeo site for the and the content dm site I will also add those in case you didn't grab them through here through the chat today I will add those to the session page um this page here uh when I put up the recording so you everybody will have access to those links directly as well in case you want to just jump to those to look at the pictures on the content dm that are still being loaded and the videos that are up there um I will say this is great I'm so glad I was able to get you guys on here today this is one of if anyone who's watching has been watching over this summer um many of my shows have been well there's a at mcallister college library technology conference which I've attended before was supposed to happen in march of this year but did not due to pandemic and I have tried to help out by putting many of the sessions that were originally going to be on that conference uh on our show so glad I was able to get you guys too well thank you so much for inviting us christa this has been it's been really nice to do this presentation that we plan for march um and um to have this venue so thank you for all that you're doing I feel bad that people couldn't attend I didn't get to attend and see everybody again so hopefully they'll do it and again in the future um but well it doesn't look like anybody is typing any um questions so I think I will wrap it up um thank you very much everyone for being here thank you brit and land this was great um I'm going to go and learn myself some german and I have all in all my free time um so that will wrap up today's show uh the recording will be available by the end of this week as I mentioned in the beginning um tomorrow is a holiday for me as being a state agency um so I'll start working on that um afterwards uh they're going to send me a link to these slides um the google slides have a link to that our archives are available here underneath our upcoming shows this is where um at the top of this list most recent ones the top there'll be a link here for today's show uh link to the recording we put up onto our library commission youtube channel and link to the slides uh while we're here I'll show you this is in our archives we do a search feature here you can search our entire show archives if you want to to uh watch any previous shows you can do the full archives or you can do just the recent 12 months and I did just mention the reason we have this limit is because as I mentioned earlier uh we and Compass Live premiered in January 2009 and our full show archives are here on this giant page I'm not going to scroll all the way down because that would be crazy but if you do search this you will find shows all going all the way back to the beginning um so feel free to browse our archives watch any of our previous shows but pay attention to the original broadcast dates you never um some many shows will stand the test of time reading lists things that are you know I'm going um projects but some things information may become outdated uh services and products may change uh links might no longer work uh some things might no longer exist anymore so um just pay attention when you're watching a show there's always a date of when it was originally broadcast on here but uh we are librarians we archive things we keep things for historical purposes it's what we do so we'll always keep our full archives on here for you just make sure you do pay attention when you are watching we do also for Compass Live we do post push out into social media uh instagram twitter facebook we use the hashtag and cump live a little abbreviation and we have a link here to our facebook page so i've opened over here um where we do remind people to log in here's your reminder i posted this morning log in right away when information about highlighting our speakers when our recordings for previous episodes are available so uh if you do like to use facebook to keep up on things give us a like over there otherwise you can also just look for the hashtag here it is from here and cump live on any various social media you'd like to use so on next week's show i'll help you join us for that we are talking about summer reading next year summer reading 2021 uh planning is already in the works i know at many public libraries and sally snider who is our coordinator for children's and young adult library services will be with me to talk about titles and the topic for next year tales and tales uh i love that um so books about um animals is what the topic is for next year so please do join us for our next week's show and any of our other shows i've got december states filling up so keep an eye on the schedule to see what new top shows come up um and that thank you very much and hopefully we'll see you on a future episode of encompass live bye