 Well, welcome everybody, I'm glad you all made it. I went to a workshop that we gave here in this room years ago and the director or the workshop person in charge said, you know, everybody here is the right people. You're the right people. And I think after being online for two years, it really feels good to have people back in a room together, so this feels right. I want to say I'm going to pick up the thread that Thavia mentioned, this notion of social justice, particularly after the tragic events in Uvalde, and we'll talk about the role of OER and education and why we're trying to reframe education about communities, about social justice, about important issues that are here, and the big takeaway is that educators have always been kind of do-it-yourselfers because we're chronically underfunded, right? And that hasn't changed. In fact, in many ways it's getting worse. So the OER movement or the open education movement is really a do-it-yourself grassroots movement of educators, not just Spanish teachers, but all disciplines all across the world who are trying to figure out how we can come together to solve our own damn problems because people aren't going to help us solve them. So it is born out of frustration, economic frustration, social frustration, and it isn't very energizing because sometimes you feel like, you know, these are perennial problems. So after joining this movement, and it's been about for me over 10 years, it's really been a kind of a transformative, it's had a transformative impact on my own life. And as you start to learn a little bit more about what the open education movement is really all about, and it is a movement, by the way, hopefully you will kind of enter into our community, our own community of practice. So my job here today is to introduce you to a couple of basic concepts. What is an OER? Hopefully by the end of this talk you'll know exactly what it is. And you'll also have a sense that you are now joining a community of practice because there are many people, if you don't know very much, that's great, welcome. Because there are a lot of people here in this room who know a lot, but they were in your position years ago, right? So rather than talk to a French professor about heritage Spanish, there are members in the community who know a lot about OER, putting together the notion of OER and the teaching of heritage Spanish here in Texas. So you'll be hearing from them. But so instead of giving you a PowerPoint, I thought, wait a second now, I'm going to make this really easy so that everybody can follow along. So you have everything because as long as you have access to the internet, you have access to my talk today. So I'm going to give you, we actually have a course that is an introduction to all the concepts of open education, and it's made specifically for language teachers. So I'm going to be doing that. Basically, what I want to do is show you this talk, I'll show you this course. And we're going to just scratch the surface, I'm going to get you going. So it's kind of an infomercial for the course. And like a lot of things in a workshop, you're going to learn some new ideas, but then it's going to be up to you to kind of unpack them and continue. So we're just going to start the course. We're not going to make our way all the way through the course, okay? And then since I want this to be a little bit more interactive, you can certainly interrupt me or ask a question if I'm talking about something that you don't understand, okay? So please, let's make this kind of pretty informal here. So ask me questions as they come up, as they arise to you. And then I'm going to give you an example of an OER that's created other OERs, and I'm going to get you to brainstorm a little bit about how you would use this. And then we're going to end up with a big new initiative that I'm very excited about, and I'm going to ask for your input. Okay, so let's get going. So this is the front door of Coral, our website. And as Coral stands for the Center for Open Educational Resources, or OER, and Language Learning, there are 16, we are a national resource center funded by the Department of Education. There are 16 of them throughout the United States, but we all pretty much do the same thing. That is, we promote the learning of languages, and we do that by creating materials, giving workshops, et cetera. All of this is funded by taxpayer money. So when I go and meet people, and I'll give them one of our textbooks or what are our materials, I say, here you go. It's free, or, well, you already bought it, because your money, it's your taxpayer money, so here you go. So the main point I'm going to be making here is that OER, which are educational materials, right, they're not just free because that's a bit of a misnomer, it's kind of incorrect. They cost money to produce, right? So the money is in the system, the money comes from taxpayers, and we try to make it then free for end users for our students because finances, money keeps people out of the educational system. So here's the main idea of open education. I identify myself as an open educator. The idea here, and this started about 20 years ago when people started thinking about social systems. Social systems have a way of over time kind of closing down and a few people start to take control of things, and it shuts other people out. So in education, we have people who are shut out who do not have access to education, you agree, right? There are many school districts that don't offer foreign languages and so they don't have the opportunity to take language courses. There are many institutions that don't offer heritage Spanish. You have Spanish, but not heritage Spanish, and we know that's inappropriate. So access is key, and so open education, we're trying to open up the educational system to give people access who don't have it. Now one of the things that we've been noticing is that tuition, the cost of education, particularly in higher education, is really skyrocketing. It's really going up, and that of course is shutting people out because they cannot afford it. So ever after World War II, in this country, more and more and more people started taking, going to colleges and getting a college degree. Well, at the millennium, that started to level off and it's actually going down a little bit. So education as a system is beginning to shut down for financial reasons and that's terrible. So again, what we're trying to do is meet these challenges of a closing down system, of a system that's closing down with the resources of the internet, and I'll show you what that means. Okay, so if you go to hear the materials and of course, by the way, can I just see a show of hands? How many people have seen our website? It's been to our website. Yay, okay, not everybody. That's good, okay. So if you go to the language learning materials, you'll see, wow, we have materials in over 20 some languages, that's pretty good. And of course, Spanish is in the list. But in addition to language learning materials, so like text books and activities and so forth, we have this little button here called open education. Click on that and that takes you to the introduction for OER for language educators and that's of course my talk today. So this is an entire online course that you can take and I would ask you to follow up this workshop with this link here. So let's just jump right in. Intro to OER, okay. Traditional language textbooks are limiting. With no way to customize them, teachers can feel stuck. We're here to tell you about open educational resources. An OER is any material shared by its creator that has a creative commons or other open license and is available at low to no cost. While traditional textbooks have a copyright preventing you from making copies or modifications, OERs allow you to remix, revise and reuse materials, creatively adapting your resources and sharing them with language teachers and classrooms all over the world. Come explore this new pedagogical landscape and open up your resources and your classroom. Is any object that you can use in teaching for educational purposes that, okay, that carries an open copyright. Okay, that's the thing that makes it different. So how many of you use commercial textbooks in your program? Okay, I'd say like half, okay. And then the rest of you, you don't use commercial materials, you use your own materials, right? Okay, so we have a nice mix here. OER then are, sometimes they are produced just by a professor or just by an instructor. They can be produced by an institution, but they're typically not produced by a commercial publishing company. They have a license that is open and I'll explain that in just a minute. Okay, so if you've ever opened up in your textbook, by the way, all of you probably, everybody in this room has violated copyright. I'm pretty sure that you've all violated, we've all violated copyright together. Teachers are terrible, daily. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Because you see, you look at a magazine which is copyrighted, or you look at another textbook which is copyrighted and you see, that would be perfect for my classroom, right? And what do you do? You make a copy and that's not good. That violates copyright. And you don't wanna just make one copy because you've got 20 students in the class. You make 20 copies, okay? So that's 20 violations. And then another part of copyright means distribution, the right to make a copy and then you distribute it. That's part of copyright law. So copyright, the concept of copyright is actually a bunch of different rights put together. So OER gives you the right, they talk about it as these, the five Rs. You have the right to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute. Talk about the five Rs in OER. What does that mean? The right to retain. Well, believe it in the digital world, an educational object can disappear off your laptop. Some commercial publishers are they're clever. They wanna make a profit and they understand that if they rent it to you for a certain amount of time, it can then disappear off your laptop. But we're talking about the right that you have to retain your materials forever, okay? That's a right. You have the right to reuse them and the right to use the content in a wide range, a different range of ways. So in class in a study group on a website in a video, that has to be specified in copyright law that you can use it in different contexts. You can actually go in and revise it. Now imagine if you could take your Spanish one textbook and go in and change the copy. No, no, no, you can't do that in copyright, right? By the way, copyright's the C in the circle. You've all probably seen it, right? And in English, it's followed by three words. All rights reserved, which is this kind of a stance. Not very open, right? So we're trying to come up with an alternative to copyright, which is some rights reserved. I'm gonna negotiate those rights. Okay, so the right to retain, to reuse, to revise, I can change the text. I can actually take two OERs and remix them, put them together. So I like that. Chapter one in that textbook. Chapter two in that textbook. I can mash them up. I can put them together. And finally, the right to redistribute, which is basically pass it all out to the student. That's another part of the way we conceptualize copyright. Because there's no sense of making a copy if you can't give it to everybody. So these are then the five R's that we are gonna negotiate within users. That copy, that open licenses give you the right to negotiate. Okay, so, what are the benefits of OER? What would you imagine that you could do, like with this open copyright, you could do all these things? What do you think the benefits might be? First of all, let me reframe the question. I know that Jose Esteban has produced OER. What have been the benefits for you that's huge? Our students love it that they don't have to pay here. We, in the French program here at the University of Texas, we've been using OER for about seven, eight years. Maybe even more, no, more than that. And we were calculating not recently. We've saved them $3 million. Huge. So the average American college student spends $5,000. This is the average, depends on where they are, white institution, community colleges, four-year institutions. So $5,000 on materials, on pedagogy materials or textbooks. Now, that's a lot of money, especially for students who are first in their family to go to college, right? And they're not expecting this big chunk. They've already paid a lot of money to get in for tuition. And they don't have on their radar this idea of having to spend a lot more for a $200 textbook, which is the average of a commercial textbook. So finances are, as you mentioned the first one, that's been found through research to be really big. Our students really enjoy not having to pay for their textbook. But you also mentioned then something that people say again and again, it's the flexibility or the adaptability. You can take something and localize it. Make sure that it fits your classroom. Because heritage Spanish in Texas is different than teaching it in Miami, or in Los Angeles or wherever. And you need to take advantage of the locality. Okay. So let's say the other thing here, this is not, you can't see this very well, but I'm going to have you open up your packet and you'll see in your packet that you've been given, your folder, you'll see this brochure, open the brochure, and you have an array of the spectrum of open licenses. So I want you to kind of hear, I'm introducing this maybe to some of you for the first time, what does it look like? And I want you to start paying from now on, start paying attention to these licenses because they're going to be really important. All the different open content on the internet should carry an open license and that tells you what you can do with it. Okay, but look in the red zone, ooh bad, that's closed. That's the C in the circle. That stands for copyright. Now we understand that's commercial products. Commercial, I'm not here to bash publishing companies. They offer us value. They produce products that are important, but they're inappropriate sometimes for our classrooms and that they're generic. And as you all know, teaching a regular Spanish class for the general population is not exactly what you're doing in heritage. You have a different population. And there aren't as many materials for heritage Spanish as there are for the general population, right? Because of the profit motive, right? It's just a smaller group. So if it were flip, I guarantee you there'd be a lot more heritage Spanish textbooks on the market. Okay, so we actually see from just this visual that the concept of copyright or the notion of open and closed is not a binary. It's actually on a continuum. So you open up or you close down. So in other words, there are some licenses that are really very open. You could do anything you want with it. You've heard of public domain. Here's a symbol for public domain. And if an object, if an image or a music or a video, if it has this copyright, that means you can do anything you want with it. It's in public domain. We don't even know who created it perhaps. So there's nobody to point back to to say thank you. It's just as you're, it's available. The next one in this continuum, you'll see it has a little icon cut the picture of a person, right? And you'll notice that all of these licenses, they're called Creative Commons License or CC licenses. All of these licenses have that icon, every single one of them. And that's because it's called attribution. In other words, if you make a material, Jose made materials, Jose and Yanina for their program in Rio Grande Valley. They have to point back. If they publish those materials, they have to say thank you to the originator. That's basically what that means. So attribution comes with all of these because we're trying to build a structure for teaching people how to share our materials and our ideas. And the Sina Kunon, the basis for this is to point back and say thank you for creating this. I'm gonna adapt it because it's not quite right for my classroom, but man, you did a great job and I'm gonna take it in a little bit of a different direction. But I'm not plagiarizing, I'm giving you credit for starting this. And we're all, that's what you do. That's the kind of, that's just good practice, right? It's like we wanna share with each other and we don't want anybody ripping off our ideas. We wanna give credit where credit is due, okay? So these icons then are pretty, I think, transparent. If you see a dollar sign with an X mark through it, non-commercial purposes only. You can use this, but you can't use it for, you can't sell it to anybody. If you have, let's say, you see that kind of, like in a circle, it goes back. That means it has an S-A under it. That means, do you see that, that icon? That means that you have to, it says share alike, but it really means that you have to use exactly that license. So if you're creating your own materials and you see that S-A symbol, you have to adopt that license, right? So it's sharing alike or adopting the license alike. And then finally, the last one, the last icon is the, what is it, the equal sign. That means no derivatives. It says in D, that just simply means you can't change it. Use it as is. So the beginning has to look like the end. So again, to use Jose's example, if he creates materials at RGV, and he's taking from Baylor's program, right? But Baylor has adopted this license that says it has the equal sign. That just means use our materials, give us credit, but don't change it. So he can't change that, those, okay? So those are icons that you need to start paying attention to because they tell you what you can and can't do with the content. Okay, now let's take a test. I said this is gonna be interactive and this is a workshop, so I hope you're awake. Oh no, a test. Okay, which of the following describes an OER? Being free or low cost and having an open license, being free to view online, being sourced from a reputable publisher, being available in high resolution formats. Don't you hate multiple choice tests, right? Okay, so the idea of about a multiple choice test is you're supposed to choose the best example, right? The most correct. There might be several that are pretty good, but there's one that's really good. Anybody wanna take a stab? Which ones can we just, this is not good. No, I'm gonna throw this out. You eliminated some right away, right? Hopefully. Okay, which one? The third one, yeah. Being sourced from a reputable publisher? No, we're trying to not do what the commercial publishers do, so no, nothing to do that. What else? I can't hear you, you need to speak up. Okay, so which one is it? First one. Okay, I didn't say sometimes you have to pay, sometimes they're free, sometimes you have to pay a little, but they're low cost. We're trying to keep the cost down, and it has an open license. Okay, this is my goal here in this opening session, is to hammer in the notion that if it doesn't have an open license, it's just free stuff on the internet, and you don't know how you can use it, so be careful. A lot of people don't know how to play this game yet. They wanna give it away, they're full of altruism. I created this great textbook for you, but they forget this last step, which is to put on an open license. By putting on an open license, so let's make sure that this is the correct answer. Yay, okay, it is the correct answer. By putting on an open license, it tells people explicitly what they can and can't do. Okay, now let's look at this other one. Which of the following can be an OER? A course, a video, lesson plans, a syllabi, a podcast, all of them. So anything, as I said, it's a heterogeneous group. Anything can be an OER, boom, if it's used for educational purposes. So that can be anything, but you wanna make sure that all of those different things, objects carry an open license. All right, so let's move on in this course. Remember that we're just getting you started on the course, and you're gonna be taking it on your own. So one of the things that I like to tell people is, when they're just starting out to try to create materials, they don't know much about how to use the search engine, because you've probably, everybody here has used a search engine. Everybody here has Googled something, right? You go to Google and you type in a keyword, and then you hit search, and it gives you five million hits. Okay, what we're trying to do, though, is search for open content. Content that has an open license that lets you play the game of open. Okay, so if you go to Google, there's a button on the Google search engine that says advanced, click on it, and this is what you'll see. In other words, you can filter the entire internet just for open content, content that carries open law, and you will be amazed by how much open content. Millions of videos, millions of objects. Okay, so let's, I was thinking you can try, it says all these words, and I'm gonna, okay, so I'm gonna do a unit on Kamales, because it is, it's Christmas time, it's Navidad, then I wanna talk about, right, this notion of different family traditions, and that's one of our family traditions. And also, so you type in the word Kamales, and that you know, but then at the very bottom, there's something called usage rights. And here you can filter it according to the licenses that we just, I just showed you. So do you want content that's free to use or share? Yeah, that sounds good. Are free to use or share even commercially? Yeah, yeah. Free to use or share or modify, free to use or share or modify even commercially. So let's do the last one, because that's the most open of all. Okay, so we're trying to find content on the internet that's completely open that has to do with Kamales. All right, okay, we're gonna choose that one. Advanced search. Okay, of course I get Mexican restaurants. And I get Wikipedia, of course. I get all images, and remember, you can expand all of these, right? But, and on and on and on. So the main point here, though, is that this is going to give you not millions of hits, but maybe thousands of hits, but they're all openly licensed, so you can use them in your materials, and you don't have to worry about it. Okay, so that's some little tip. I think some of you probably now know that you can filter the internet using Google Advanced Search. All right, another search tool that's really cool. And remember, you have to remember where all this stuff is in the course. This is something called OpenVerse, and I love using this tool. So let's see what Kamales gives us here. Oops, got to spell it right, I guess. Okay, and search. Okay, and it shows us, you can filter this, this automatically gives you images, but you can filter it by audio, files, and video and so forth. Yeah, now, what's interesting is, if you scroll over all these different images, let's a cute image. Oh, what's this? What is that? That sits open license. It's a CC, that little icon means attribution, so you have to give credit to the photographer in this case. You can't use it for commercial purposes, and you're not allowed to Photoshop it, because it says no derivative, you don't mess with it, just use it as is. See, it's pretty easy. You already learned the icons. Okay, now, again, all of these are, they might carry different licenses. This picture is the most open of all, because it just says, look, the only restrictions are you have to give me thanks, if they point back to the attribution. Okay, I noticed up here, music, let's take a look. I don't know what this is. This is interesting to me. I'd like to hear, is there a song about tamales? This might be, okay. Ah, of course it's in French, that's interesting. Let's play this. Oh, we don't have the sound. Oh, too bad, okay. I'm not sure why the sound isn't hooked up. Okay, but you can see there are videos and audio and there's all kinds of content. All right. Now, what's interesting here is that there are all kinds of little tricks to the tray to learn how to make your search more productive and this is buried in this course. You're gonna have to learn that by going through the course. Okay, so another thing, let's see how am I doing on time here. Okay, that's pretty good. I got 10 more minutes. One of the things we like to teach people right from the beginning is there are, you don't have to like create from scratch or OER. There are lots of content that's already there available for you but people don't know where to find it. You can go to the internet and just type in a word and that just gives you content. If you're really looking for an OER that somebody else has prepared, such as Jose, then what you might wanna think about is going to what's called a repository, okay. So here we teach you a little bit about repositories. This is a very big one, Merlot. And Merlot is a huge repository of educational content, multimedia, educational, so I don't know what the acronym stands for. But the good thing about a repository is that it has an editorial staff. So there are people who, in world languages, who vet the content and say, yeah, this stuff is good. So this is one repository and just to show you what it looks like, here are all the materials in this discipline. This is the world languages part of Merlot. I mean Merlot has, if you're an algebra teacher or if you're a scientist, they have all the different disciplines, but here we're just looking at foreign languages. So we have Arabic and Chinese and French and German and here's Spanish. So if we click on Spanish, I really love this. I did this last night and I thought, yes! The number one OER was produced by Orlando Kellam from the University of Texas at Austin. It's called Spanish Proficiency Exercises. And what's so great about this is it's not just the editorial staff at Merlot that says, this is good. It's all the other people out there who are using these anecdotes by star rating, which is why it bubbles to the top, right? Okay. All right, so that's Merlot. That's just one of many different repositories we show you others. This is another great repository called the Open Textbook Library out of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. So these are librarians who vet all this content and make sure that they meet the criteria. So you can actually search the library. I mean, here, these are all foreign language textbooks, but let's, we don't want all foreign languages. We don't, toot the tabula. So we're not teaching Italian, we're teaching Spanish. Let's see what that gives us. Okay. So these are all complete, these are open first year, second year. Some of these are intermediate Spanish for professionals, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. There's a lot of content out there available for you. That's my point that I'm trying to make. And the best place to start is looking at repositories. Where's Estela? Oh. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Yeah, this is incredible. I didn't plan that, but that's great, right, okay. What's also really cool, so this has just been uploaded, this is fairly recent, and how do I know that? Because it hasn't been reviewed yet. So you can go in and what, and the great thing about this site is that it has really extensive reviews from people who are using the materials. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, let's say, now. There are, all right, this is also really fun. There are repositories that you're searching for just different kinds of media. So I know I'm obsessed by Tamales, but if you wanted just to search repositories that have images, instead of just going and typing in Google, which gives you all kinds of stuff, these are, look at all the repositories just for images of things. You've probably all heard of Flickr, which is the world's largest repository of photographs. But this is a really cool, there's a repository of just icons that you can use, these are open icons. So you can jazz up your handouts or whatever by using this. And I don't know if there's an icon for Tamales, but there should be. Yeah. And so for audio, well, that would be important for languages. So there's an entire site for searching free music, open music. I love this audio lingua. This is really terrific. You can, if you have many different languages, so again, of course we're gonna do Tamales.