 I'd like to introduce Christian Hilchi from the University of Texas at Austin, and he's going to be talking to us today about his project reality check or embracing open the reality check project. Christian it's all yours. All right, thank you Carl. Um, so yeah so I'm going to be talking about my project reality check this is a project that started in 2014. It was sponsored by the Center for European Studies as well as my home department the Department of Slavic and Eurasian studies, and I worked intimately with Carl and Natalie here with the Center for open educational resources and language learning. A phenomenal aid in terms of the advice as well as the tech support, graphical design all sorts of issues that that I needed help with so I'm really grateful for everything that they did and continue to do reality check is under a CC by essay license I chose this license. Not only because of the my overall agreement with the license and I really like what it what it enables in terms of sharing and sort of creating, you know, promoting the ethos the open ethos that is going to mean that you know if I create this resource. If other people want to work on it they're going to contribute back to to altering my project. In the end, it also was because I was finding that was using a lot of share like content from with media comments as well as other sites. I really wanted to use that and it was really integrated very tightly into the into the project so it was kind of a necessity to choose that license. But overall I think it was a choice that I would would happily make again. It ended up being quite a massive project much bigger than I ever expected. I mean here you can see just some of the figures that are associated with it. So, you know, we lots of grammar and culture lessons quizzes that are located on canvas and activity book as well as homework exercises that are printable interview videos that I'll talk about in a minute map videos as well as lots of use of Quizlet for the platform. Now, why reality check and actually before I even talked about that I want to talk about this graphic here. This is one of Natalie's creations and it's meant to look like a beer coaster the checks are really well known for their, their very good beer. And so we wanted something that sort of captured that aspect of their culture. It started off with these reality style interviews that were filmed in Prague as well as in Austin we have some Czech students that come every semester to UT. And it was because I had come up with these lists of questions that every student needed to answer for various units that I was using in a previous textbook. And they actually take those those questions and film native speakers answering them. And the result was here is just one example. What do you do when you have a headache and I'll just start playing the video just so you can get an idea what these interview videos look like. So this is how they are arranged on our website. So we have them divided into novice intermediate and intermediate advanced. That's just a result of the fact that I had so many speakers who had volunteered to be in the videos that and I was finding actually that some were more you know very simple answers one two words a sentence maybe two sentences at most and some people were really responding in paragraph like utterances. And since I had that material it really made sense to utilize them and make them available to the public I will note though for the textbook itself I only utilize those from the novice intermediate because this course is geared for a or towards a beginning. Check language instruction course. So the course is run. It's a flipped classroom. There's a pre class in class. Components and post class components. And it's just a cycle that keeps repeating every day. And this is what the pre class looks like now if you want to take a look at any of these materials you can go to reality check dot org, and you will see it like this so this is how it exists on. And this is what the pre class looks like now if you want to take a look at any of these materials you can go to reality check dot org, and you will see it like this so this is how it exists on the publicly facing website, and various aspects of the course here So for example, if you were if you had access to the key you would see that some of these are grammar explanations, Quizlet is obvious there's some, some various quizzes usually auto grade type quizzes to test knowledge of the of the topics that we're learning. Pre class involves a lot of just, you know, just these various thematically related explanations, as you can see I like to use a lot of pictures in there something I'm going to talk about in just a minute. Pre class also includes canvas quizzes a lot of these are, as I said fill in the blank or multiple choice something that can be graded and they can and the students can get feedback immediately. I use a lot of Quizlet in the curriculum and I tried to use it to its utmost so basically anything that I could think of that could work within within Quizlet parameters of all the different types of activities that they have. I tried to utilize those in thoughtful ways in the course. So in their course modules when vocabulary is introduced, or even grammar topics I use Quizlet as a way to quickly reinforce those forms in class is all about practicing the language in various scenarios also using games things like that and I tried to really utilize all of the positive aspects of Google Drive. So, here you can see for example on the left. This is a memory type game you can download a set of cards so this links to another Google Doc where you can, you can click on it to get all those cards print them out cut them out and have them available for class. Similarly, oftentimes activities are given not only in the activity book but as a PowerPoint type presentation or rather Google Slides, and you can click on those and get access to those as well. So I really like to utilize a lot of reality in the textbook so here's just one example where we're talking about clothing preferences and giving opinions on clothing and, and this one YouTube user decided to give three examples of a work outfit that they like and ask the viewers you know what do you think you like the best and so this is a perfect opportunity for us to use reality, and really also show the students how much they've learned you know they walk away from these types of activities I never knew that I would have actually, you know, understood that much after that being are doing check for just a few months. So I'm going to skip this one for here. Post class is given either at the end of a canvas module or here on the public course site on the right hand side. These are various Google Docs and these Google Docs again. They involve more of the type of use of language that builds from the skills that we learned in the pre-class in the in class. So, lots of creating with language, giving opinions, or coming up with their own descriptions, things like that. Oftentimes also I take advantage of the fact that we do have access to stores, for example, so why not send them shopping so there's just one example taken from an assignment where they have to do some shopping for groceries and plan a meal at Tesco in Prague. So, getting to the title of my presentation which was embracing open. I've kind of identified three different areas where I feel that the reality check really tried to take advantage and leverage all of the open or all of the sort of the values of openness that we often talked about. And one was really reusing and remixing of other content that's currently available. In other words, not reinventing the wheel. And so, you know, we know about this in terms of talking about the five hours. So, you know, there's so much material that's out there why not take advantage of this and so this involved lots of different repositories of open images, literally thousands and thousands of images have been used throughout the, throughout the curriculum. And just as you saw from a few examples, images are a constant presence in the course, everything from clip art to to actual photos from places like Wikimedia Commons or all of the different public domain websites as well. And I use them, I try to use them in creative ways so it might be creating mean like content and using that to teach words and phrases or just to, you know, sometimes when you're when you're doing something really tough. It's kind of fun for the students to run across some sort of funny content. Or even if we're trying to learn various words and phrases or grammar so in check. If you want to say I like to sleep you literally say I happy sleep kind of, you know, playing off that low cats kind of genre. Or if you want to say my head hurts literally head hurts me or this is one of my favorite ones that I bring up a lot. Trying to learn irregular verb forms just trying to use them and fun creative ways that helps students help these these students to retain or understand better some of the the concepts that we're learning. Now I mentioned pictures but let me talk about video as well. One of the things that I found really helpful in terms of the creation of these materials was the amazing world of blogs. There are people who create content posted under an open license on YouTube on Vimeo. And they have pretty rich channels in fact when you find one of these users, you can then click on their channel and of course you find that they always publish their content or often publish their content under a creative comments license. And so really was about, you know, making that discovery and this is one of the sort of critical moments for reality check was making this discovery that all this great content out there exists. So it's under an open license, I can use it, edit it, create sort of custom versions of it for my class. And so that's something that I tried to utilize in all of the chapters. And it can be as simple as something like a drone video that I use in the first unit. So just something where we, you know, get a chance to see Prague, and while we're at it let's talk about the things we see and of course we see lots of them so that's a natural of who packs up the plural set are so really trying to to use open media to its fuller of the extent really sort of realizing all of the affordances of open that there's this stuff out there for us so let's see if we can integrate it let's really sort of, you know, buy into the whole open project. I actually identified a number of international keywords, sort of these video genres that you can use and I think these are really helpful. You know, typing in vlog, just as an English word, and then typing in all sorts of words in the target language can get tons of great content, and not only videos related to that search but also finding those channels of users who are posting lots of open content. And I've given you some other ones here such as time lapse hall unboxing and room door and these are, as I said really fruitful genres for those considering trying to integrate openly licensed video into the curriculum. Use of platforms which allow for EC export of materials and and really this comes down to using Google and Quizlet. These are also tools that I think are helpful because we all, or most of us have used these we feel comfortable with them. So, if I want to, for example, make sure that my users can, for example, redistribute revise remix they can do these to my to my materials because that's my goal really. I want my my the people who use my forms to come up with their own custom versions to show me something that I didn't know. So this project to have continuity beyond me when I will no longer have an interest in the project that this can keep going. I want to make sure that the materials are in a format that make it makes it easy for them to be edited. And so if you go to any of the content sites on on reality check or you'll see that you can open up in three different formats, Google PDF and word. And so this really helps maintain the spirit of those five hours. Additionally, I have provided canvas export so if any instructor out there wants to adopt the whole force, including all the canvas content. This canvas content is available all the quizzes for example are available to the public over the publicly facing website. But if you want quizzes that are going to be tracked for your students, or rather to be able to track your students with those quizzes, then use one of my canvas exports and really sort of buy into the whole curriculum. And of course that gives you the option to make any modifications that you wish to. So with Quizlet you're finding these, even though these are these are resources that allow you to publish under any license including traditional copyright, allowing you to export them easily here for example in the form of CSV file is really important I think to making sure that our materials don't get stuck in a single sort of piece of technology. And on a certain sense this is actually very personal for me because as I began the project. I had all sorts of ideas but I through the process of learning about all the other open resources as well as some of the materials I myself was creating. I really learned that I had to think more openly about how what kind of materials are good and how I can use them. So, I learned actually in the process that these reality style videos that I created were really also showing us an example of non-normative language. They were using forms that weren't traditionally taught in textbooks. And then I realized that some of these ways that they're responding are actually the keys to how my students for sure is responding so I went back. And I realized that what we need to do is is embrace that what do I really need to do to teach my students to use these forms, or rather to answer these questions. And what I actually go off and say to my students now is, you know, this course really is about answering about 100 questions in check. That's kind of an oversimplification of it, but it's not by too much. The process of learning how to answer these questions about themselves, people around them really leads to them learning everything that they need to do to be proficient in in check. Really, I choose a lot of the grammar and the vocabulary based off of what they need to answer those questions. And so this really the sort of kind of example of reverse design. How do we get to where we want to go while we design backwards for that. And it was also realizing that I needed to include things like non standard check which is so common and every other instances and the interviews that I, that I filmed and created, as well as the content that I was finding on YouTube. All were examples of this common check of this sort of lower variety, but this is important and is often left out of textbooks but I felt that it was really important for my own pedagogy to question these. So we, what are the idea is the ideological basis for leaving these out. One that I really agree with and in the end it's not. And reality really was finding all of this great content that was that is out there and adapting my pedagogy to help my students interact better with with those with those things that I was finding and so, you know when I started off I started off with this scope and and you can see right there in the left the grammar was the most important thing for me and really I abandoned this as I began creating this this curriculum. To one that was more much, much more communicably driven and and as I've been describing really sort of focusing on what did the students need to achieve the order to accomplish these tasks. So I like to describe this or use the analogy of farmers market. I, instead of going to this sort of, you know, I have this elaborate plan that I for what I want to cook tonight, and then realizing maybe there's no tomatoes, or, you know there's some other vegetable I had cooking with is no longer available well, there's still a lot of great stuff out there and so, you know whether it's the open content that I was finding or the, or the materials I was finding through my interviews it was really about embracing that that and being open to that. You know what is out there and how can I use it to really help meet my proficiency goals. In the end, I can say that it has been a really positive experience because I've noticed massive changes in how my students end up their course with in terms of their proficiency gains. So it's overall been an extraordinary experience. So, again, if you want to visit the website is a reality check dot org I hope you'll you'll take a look at it I almost said check it out. And then at this point if you have any questions. I'm going to ask you a question well people are concentrating then. So your, your idea here is embracing open, and maybe you didn't really embrace open completely at first. What do you think was your biggest challenge to overcome. Why did you not like embrace openness originally. And for reasons part of it was, I was hearing that there were these great materials available, but I didn't really know how to search for them. And so there was this one night just searching in YouTube and, and I remember it was. It was like I didn't know about anything and then suddenly I'm able to, I know, you know, I'm finding all this amazing stuff and it was just a really sort of really key moment for me because I came up with, you know, maybe 20 bookmarks in the span of like 15 minutes. I realized though, I mean, I looked at it and I thought there's all this great material out there but then how do I use it. And so I had to really be creative and sort of thoughtful about how could I actually use this, this material. It's really great but it doesn't sort of fit into the pedagogical framework that I've been using the paradigm and been using so let's maybe change that paradigm. Change the paradigm. Alright. Well, thank you so much Christian.