 Welcome everyone to our first webinar this summer. I am Natalie Spinefield-Childred at Publications Manager at the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning, which is located at the University of Texas at Austin. Hello, and I'm Garen Fawns, Project Manager of Coral. Thank you all for joining us for the first of three sessions in our Coral Summer Webinar series. Today we're going to be talking a bit about finding open media for foreign language instruction. But before we do, let's go over some basic information for this session. So many of you have likely used Adobe Connect interface before, but if not, we encourage you to make this session interactive. On the left, as many of you already have found out, we have a chat room slash questions pod, for lack of a better word. You can ask questions here and we will do our best during the presentation to answer the questions that you have, but please send them along. And let's maybe have some of the technical issues that we're having around address maybe after the session or perhaps send us an email at our Coral website. We'll figure that out. We can't necessarily understand why the links aren't working for you all. But we encourage you to ask questions. If you're going to be tweeting today, please use the hashtag Coral. And if you're interested in downloading the presentation slides and some of the other resources that we have available that relate to today's presentation, there's a file share and the ability to download those resources right below the presentation. We're also going to be posting this presentation. It'll be recorded online on our website and all these slides will be available on SlideShare. If you have any technical issues or sound issues today, there is a technical help button in the top right of your screen. There is an FAQ of some of the most common technical issues using Adobe Connect there. Sometimes it may help also to try another browser such as Chrome or Firefox, which seem to be working best with Adobe Connect. If your technical problems persist, you don't have to worry about missing important key points. We will be recording today's presentation and making it available for later viewing on the website, on our website. If you get kicked out for some reason, please log in under the same name as before so we can keep track of who's here. All right. So finally, many of you who are joining us today have again already indicated you're desired to receive the CME and CPE credit. Again, we're going to figure that out and take care of it. But if you want to try the links in the info tab, go for it and try and register. But we'll be getting to figure that out and get you all a certificate of attendance. Okay. So, Darren, today we're going to talk about the process of finding and searching for authentic open media for language learning and teaching. We want to start off by talking about a wave of changes that's taking place in education and discuss how open educational resources are a part of this reform. We do intend with this session to encourage those of you interested in open educational resources to keep on working to create, share and promote these resources. And those on the other side inspire those of you who are new to the area to explore it. Well, we'll be spending a bit of time defining OER, but we're also going to talk a bit about copyright today. And especially alternative copyright licensing arrangements made possible by Creative Commons. And then we will also be trying to talk about where to search for resources and also review a few OER specific repositories and other online sites excellent for language teachers and learners. Some of them can be implemented directly into the classroom. Others enable you to just use pieces you need. And yet the other ones that we will mention invite you to build something completely new. Alright, so thanks Natalie. I'm going to start talking about reforming education. It's an ambitious topic, but I want to start here by saying that at all levels education is beginning to reimagine itself. And without a doubt we exist as part of a new culturally rich landscape in which new forms of scholarship, educational pathways and connection to resources, people and communities develop each and every day. But what is most clear is that as these new connections, communities and forms of scholarship develop, an older model of how students are supposed to learn, how teachers are supposed to teach, and how administrators are supposed to manage is quickly beginning to develop. Many people would call these disruptive innovations and they're doing just that. They're disrupting the status quo, they're challenging traditional conceptions of what we are all supposed to do as learners and as teachers, even as parents of learners. The access to resources, these new educational pathways and connections to information and individuals have opened doors to new possibilities and new methods, which we cannot even keep up with. And I know it can be intimidating, but there's no arguing that this is truly an exciting time to be a part of education. Garen, it seems that there is a lot of audio issues going on. Can we see maybe some hands raised from the people that do not get any audio or have some issues? Yes, some folks may need to enable their audio. The other thing too is that again, we're going to be recording the presentation, so for those of you who don't get it right now or just haven't yet enabled the audio, you might need to do that. It should be available later so that you can listen to it there. Again, some of these audio issues can sometimes be the connections that people have. We've optimized it for DSL. If you're on a modem, it's going to be hard. Anything better than that is definitely going to be alright. Back to this then, one of the most striking things to come as a result of these disruptions however is the fact that educators and learners have begun to dismantle the construction that learning is a linear pathway that if students simply conform to the rules and standards that have been constructed, that they'll be set. The fact is that these disruptive innovations made possible by technology, the access to resources, social media and improvements in content sharing are helping more people understand that learning and education is not about being some race toward a finish line or a college or just some job. That education is actually about creating the conditions in which the students, the teachers and all those involved in the experience of learning have the capacity to flourish. So some of these ideas are largely put forth by a gentleman named Sir Ken Robbins who argues that life is not linear. It's organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances that we can create for us. And more importantly he argues that when we look at reforming education and transforming it it isn't like cloning a system. It's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're already teaching. And in doing that is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution. It's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions to external support based on personalized curriculum. And this is what we really want all of you to begin thinking about today, which is to say thinking about the fact that we all have the opportunity to reform education and be part of this community of cultivating learning. It's our belief here at Coral that OER are an integral part of this movement in education. We believe it so much it's in the name of our center, right? It's our argument that open educational resources are a part of this wave of change in education and that they have a real place in both helping to personalize education and bring the values of organic growth into our teachers and students' educational experiences. So well, not exactly new open educational resources have undergone a radical change since their popular debut in the early part of the 2000s as MIT open coursework, right? So openly licensed educational materials have become a unique way for learners of all types to access material to peek into classrooms, but they've also become invaluable resources for teachers and students. OER have become magnificent resources for teachers to not only supplement traditional or mandated teaching aids, but also resources that serve as a point of innovation for many teachers. The licensing that comes with these OER enables teachers to repurpose and recontextualize materials for their own use, not only minimizing the work that they may have to do in order to build something from scratch, but also gives them a way to build on the works of others, improve these resources, contextualizing them and contextualizing those resources and then sharing them. It's also our argument that OER in large part are the building blocks of this free and open culture and that together these resources form a growing corpus of high quality, universal, free, personalized digital material available to teachers like you, administrators like you and learners like you. They're materials created and built by people who value education, value sharing, and who share the goals of being able to contextualize and repurpose these materials to apply to their contexts. And so we're excited to talk today about finding these open educational resources and are just incredibly excited that you're all here interested in learning more about it. So with that Are there any questions so far? We wanted to mention that we have about 60 participants chiming in, which is excellent. We would like to hear from you in general if you have any questions regarding the content of this presentation. Alright, so before you talk about finding OER, can you spend a few minutes talking about what open educational resources are and touch on why copyright plays such a big role in all of this? Yeah, alright, so among the first true definitions of an open educational resource comes from the 2002 UNESCO forum on the impact of open courseware for higher education institutions in developing countries. It was a report that was created in 2002 at that meeting and this group meant to discuss the implications of MIT's open courseware initiative and in the report that they generated from that meeting they described an open educational resource as a universal education resource available for the whole of humanity. Now I want you to hold on to that definition because we're going to come back to it in a little bit, but it's a great definition as it I think makes clear the aim of the OER movement as a whole, which is to bring resources to the public for free without restriction and for the benefit of the public, right? So of course there are other definitions whether they're ones drawn up by Wikipedia or from some foundations that support the ongoing development of OER like the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation. There are also definitions like this one that come from Dr. David Wiley, one of the pioneers of open educational resources who describes him as teaching and learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under a copyright license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. So as we try and define what open educational resources are, there's obviously many types. We've got full courses that are available through programs like MIT OpenCourseWare and other OpenCourseWare initiatives which include then course materials like syllabi, there's modules that are created for specific learning exercises and mathematics and sound or excuse me, and then science. There's full textbooks available. There's streaming videos even, of course, made available on a lot of the OpenCourseWare sites and other Open Initiative sites as well. There are tests, there's journal articles, and a whole slew of other tools and materials used to support learning. I know that Dr. Wiley, like many others in the field of OER, truly stressed the importance of differentiating between free and open. Can you talk more about this? Yeah, so this is important. I think for all of us to understand is that free and open are not really one in the same, right? So even though people will sometimes use them interchangeably, people make frequent reference to resources and software that are free and even conflate open access with this concept of open, but that's not necessarily what we mean when we use that word. When we talk about OER being open and free, we're not just talking about free access or free as in no charge, like this image of free stuff on the side of the road, right? Well, no cost and no cost to access are components of what we mean. What we're mainly stressing is the concept of freedom, right? In the concept of freedom to reuse, to revise, to remix and redistribute the material. This is also kind of known as the 4R. One of the important things to note here is that there are a vast number of online resources that can be accessed for free and used in the educational context. Think about every web search that we do or news article that we read on the web. The majority of these resources are free and that's one of the most important things about the internet, but few of the resources that we come across are actually open. In other words, open and free to legally download, share, remix, reuse, and revise, right? So that's what this graph demonstrates in the largest part. This is from David Wiley who sort of tries to put this in play by saying that about content on, you know, the internet is free to access, but if you really want to actually make use of that content you build upon it, change it, contextualize it, and share with others you run into some potentially major challenges with copyright. Okay, but before we unpack copyright, I think it might be helpful for me and others if you could explain what it meant by reuse, revision, remixing, and redistribution. Yeah, alright, so I sort of mentioned this is the 4Rs earlier, and you'll hear this maybe quite a bit or you'll see a lot in the context of Creative Commons and whatnot. And the basic concepts behind that is that materials that are OER or openly licensed are generally, depending on the license, giving you the possibility to reuse it. In other words you have the ability or the right to reuse that content in its unaltered or verbatim form, like backing up a copy of the content onto your hard drive. You could revise that content, right? You can adapt it or adjust it, modify it, or even alter it if you wanted to, like translating it into another language if you wanted to or adding some other component to make it fit your context. The other R in this context is remix, right? Giving you the ability to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new. So you could incorporate this content into a mash-up, let's say, or a variety of other videos, let's say, or if you're making your own video, you can put it in there. And of course the other R in this is the ability for you to redistribute that, meaning you have the right to share the copies of the original content, your revisions or your remixes with others. So giving a copy to a colleague or a friend or someone else, whether that be in person or online. So explain how copyright works in relation to the 4R concept. Alright, so copyright provides the content creator and the individual who holds the copyright with the exclusive right to control how people can utilize their work. They retain what is called all rights reserved. And that's not bad, right? It's that copyright gives the copyright holder the opportunity to protect against uses that they don't consent to. It's a brilliant part of our legal system and I think in large part it's an essential part of encouraging innovation, right? But, or just to add on to that, I guess what that means is that a person who has copyright has the ability to limit the 4Rs that we just talked about, right? The copyright holder then has the exclusive right to make copies of the creative work. They have the exclusive right to control how it's distributed or shared and who can sell that work. They limit who can perform or display that work in public. They even limit who then can make derivative works, including adaptations and supplemental materials. They control who can make in large part and distribute those derivative works. And most importantly they license who has the ability to do that as well, right? So copyright in large part is a big deal, right? Anything that's created by someone, whether it be art or writings or music, movies, it could be a number of different things generally. For your copyright nerds out there, they all understand what I'm saying, but generally would have copyright. And then in most cases that creator of this work would obtain copyright to that work. Which means then that copyright, or that copyright holder automatically has the all rights reserved copyright on that work controlling who can copy it, distribute it and modify it. And going back to the point as we talked earlier is that most of the content on the web is actually all rights reserved. So one of the things though that I want to mention here in this is that I want us to ask ourselves what the purpose of copyright actually is. And it says it right in the constitution of all places is that the purpose of copyright, and this may go contrary to what you expect it to be, is to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for a limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. So basically what this says is that copyright is meant to promote intellectual and technological progress for the benefit of society, right? And so remember that UNESCO definition that we talked about earlier, a universal resource available for the whole of humanity? Well in large part these definitions are similar which is quite unique in thinking through the purpose of a lot of, or the intention at least behind a lot of these the desires here to share resources. Copyright law in large part then is about the balance between the authors need to make money and societies need for greater progress. But for progress to happen people need to be able to share knowledge and create works based on other works. And this is where in large part the notion of limited time comes into play. But the limited time is anything but that. Right now because of extensions in copyright law we're looking at the life of the author plus 70 years before somebody can technically utilize an all rights reserved work before that copyrighted material falls into public domain. And who knows it very well may get extended. Originally it was 14 years with one renewal maximum before it entered the public domain. But in large part you can see sort of the complexity of this which is if we don't have any sort of alternatives we very well limit our content our ability to access content and build upon that which limits the ability for society to progress. So let's say I want others to use and modify the work I create. What if I want others to make use of the photo I took or a lesson plan I have written or presentation I have made. How can I let others know that this is the way I intended this to be used. Yeah so anyone who creates something can let others know how they would like to share the resource by using what's called a Creative Commons license. And many of you might know about this others you may not. But openly licensing content is actually really easy. It basically takes this concept of all rights reserved and moves it to the notion of some rights reserved. You don't abandon your copyright by using a Creative Commons license. You basically just extend it. Remember that last part of copyright talking about one of the rights that we have is limiting the ability or allowing us to license the content to others. Well that's basically what Creative Commons helps one do is it gives you the ability to license that material to others. Creative Commons licenses enable the copyright holder to extend the privileges of copyright to others at a minimum by allowing or having people attribute the work back to the author. And you can place other restrictions on the content that you create or the content that you would be trying to use. And such as that it may not be used for commercial purposes or that I can't change it or that if I included in another work that that work also must carry a Creative Commons license. But most importantly is that these licenses truly give the user a clear understanding that they can copy and distribute work without having to ask for permission from the copyright holder. It gives them an understanding that they can legally download and publish the material in a stable location so you don't have to rely just on linking. And in some cases it gives you the ability to adapt and customize the materials for yourself or for your learners, right? So, Garen is anything with a CC license on it in OVR? Yeah, I mean you could basically say that anything that has a license on it is open and also what you can say is that anything that's in the public domain works it would fall out of copyright and created by the government or have been dedicated in the public domain are basically free as OVR. I should back up and maybe explain this slide here that basically Creative Commons licenses and the benefit of these licenses, again as we were talking about just basically allow those users to know exactly that that we talked about that. But I still don't quite understand why is open so important especially when I can get pretty much all I want to use off the internet for free regardless of whether it is copyrighted or not. Why should we be looking for items with Creative Commons licenses on them? Yeah, so this in some ways is the question, right? It's been asked since the age of the dawn of the internet, right? You can find pretty much anything on the internet so why put in the effort to find and search for open content you can just open up a search engine and find images and videos and songs and other resources totally for free, right? So why worry about finding open content when teachers and educators are protected under fair use to make use of copyrighted content for educational purposes at least here in the United States? I think what we're trying to talk about today and promote and hopefully encourage in a lot of you is that opening up a web browser and finding free content is an old model, right? It's an old and unproductive habit to simply use anything. We certainly understand that it's easy but it's also something of a dead-end approach in the process of learning and as a part of the goal of reforming education. What we're trying to encourage is for teachers and administrators, support staff and students to reframe the way that they think about teaching, managing and supporting education. Do we have a question? Yes, we do have a question. Aline asks us why our core resources are under a Creative Commons license that allows commercial use and if we could explain this option and why we choose this option. So the question is core resources are under a license allowing for commercial use. First of all, not all of our products are under a commercial, usable license. They're all different and we're making sure that we ask our project directors what they want to do, what they want the end user to be able to do with their resources. That gives them the freedom to feel better about what they're putting out there. Yeah, sometimes folks feel that by putting on some of these other restrictions on the material such as having a share like license or a no-derivatives or even in this case an on-commercial is too much of a limitation and that they want to see that material go as far as possible and by having simply someone attribute the author and that's good enough. I know of a lot of folks who actually also dedicate material straight into the public domain and a lot of the images that you'll see in this presentation are just that. Images that have just been cast out there for everybody to use and remix or repurpose. I don't think that we're necessarily going after the goal of making money on these resources and it's possible some of the things that we do with print-on-demand resources we can recoup but at the same time the goal is again for people to get them into their hands and reuse them as best as they possibly can. So the end goal I think also is to have as wide of an exposure as you can get because pretty much everything today is driven by popularity also and opening it up to commercial use gives you new platforms of distribution. That's true. That's a really good point to say on that. Somebody had asked her who the presenter is I'm Darren Fawns. I said that earlier on in the presentation but some of you who just joined us should probably interrupt and do a station break or something. Yes. And this is Natalie Steinfeld- I'm Natalie Steinfeld-Children. I'm the Publications Manager at Quill. There was also a question about iTunes U less than. Oh okay so iTunes U some lessons are licensed others are not. So this gets to the reality of some of these materials being open access as in free to access but if you want to let's say download them or reuse them broadcast them you might be limited by some of the same licensing that would occur when you're downloading a song. You can't remix that song necessarily or rebroadcast it. So you really have to look closely at how some of the resources that are published in places are really licensed. And we'll get to some of that here as we talk more about in the next half about finding and sharing some of these resources as well. So getting back to this sort of talk about why we should even begin using open educational resources to encourage for them and what not is again trying to really encourage people to sort of change their mindset about what education is truly about. And so we want people to begin thinking about larger questions. What if instruction were contextualized in real events of the world in professional discourse. What if learners were asked to do their work in the open web where peers and mentors and practitioners could encourage learners digital identities. Questions like what if learners were encouraged to connect their learning with content being produced by practitioners in their area of study. What if we encourage a more organic approach to education where instead of simply trying to make students learn we're more focused on finding ways to create the conditions for growth and improvement. These are the sort of questions that we're really focused on and we feel that OER is a part of creating this sort of environment. Okay so saying we're all on board with open educational resources we understand the benefits and now we're eager to find them where do we go. Alright so this is the title of the presentation all the other stuff in large part was leading up to this but we're going to talk in general now about finding open educational resources by using web tools. One of the best places I think for folks to go and we've mentioned it now just in talking about the licenses is to CreativeCommons.org. They have a great search engine built into their website where you can search across a variety of different both databases and websites for open content. Now I hesitate to call it a search engine I think they are doing something very different technologically but is a great place for you to know that you're actually conducting the search right and from there you can begin branching out into some of these other areas. I see a question here from Adriana which is if neither symbols are present is it safe to assume it's open. So this is a good question. It's actually I would say it's probably not safe to assume it's open. By default someone who creates something that has copyright or excuse me by default somebody who creates something automatically receives a copyright. You don't have to put a copyrighted symbol on it you don't have to register your copyright with someone. So if it's a creative work it's likely under copyright so if you see a symbol with a Creative Commons license on it then yes it's going to be open. If you see a resource created by the United States government or a work that appears incredibly old let's say prior to the 1900s you're most likely going to be fined to use that resource but the default assumption unfortunately the resource is probably not available which in large part or excuse me is not open so it leads a lot of people to simply using stuff without really knowing. There's another question about you mentioning digital identity. I don't know if I talked so much about a digital identity but I think what I'm getting at in this is that there are digital innovations that are happening or that they're basically a part of how we're learning and how we're interacting with one another. I mean perhaps when we talk about digital identities with learners is that technology no longer is something that's incredibly special. It's ubiquitous. It's in our pockets. It's in our backpacks. It's at home. It's among our friends. It's something that's pretty much everywhere so we by default have a digital identity. And again we're talking about this in the context of many places in the US not all environments are of course as privileged but for students a lot of students even in places that are less privileged access to technology is there. And again it's not just about technology but in some ways it's about access to other connections that are made possible by those technologies. But as a result of that with technology not being as special I would imagine that people are focused more on what it means to learn. Look we don't need these tools to be enamored by the tools to be enamored by the connection and by the learning that happens as a result of that. So Aline if you have got a more specific question but I'd love to hear it. So what about if you convert something from one source to another like in the case of a YouTube video or a WMB file? Again you're going to have to look at the licenses. YouTube by default has a standard YouTube license which gives the individual who uploads the content to YouTube their copyright. If you convert that file this is one of those gray areas of copyright. You very well may need to ask for permission because the reality there is that you're going to be potentially sharing it but if it's for personal use I think you're probably going to be alright if it's going to be in the context of the classroom you're probably going to be alright under fair use but you have to really ask your question of why am I changing this format? For what purpose is it intended? If it's intended to share with others then you might be in a position of infringing someone's copyright. But if it's under Creative Commons by license they are free to do whatever they want. Absolutely. Now if it's under a non-derivative license then you may not very well be able to do that. So it's fair to the end user and we actually when everyone of you in the future puts a license on the materials you create that will just be a better way to communicate to people who are using your resources what they can do. That's great. Alright so with the 20 minutes remaining we're going to keep going through looking at places to find OER in general and we're going to really get on to talking about language learning specific resources. I love the copyright questions and I think we're going to have to do an entirely new session on it and we very well. So the next thing I want to show you after Creative Commons and please go there and check it out is obviously most of us are doing Google searches to find resources when we're putting together lesson plans or trying to find content that's exciting. What I would suggest is that people check out if they haven't underneath basically your control panel of the Google browser, look at the settings page here and go to the advanced search and if you've never done this before you can go to usage rights which appears in the bottom of the page and you can filter the results that you receive by license type giving you materials that would fit your context whether it's ones that you want with just attribution or ones that you feel you would perhaps put into a different resource that you might monetize in some way. So check out that for sure. Another place that you can turn to to just find general content we're talking about photos and videos and sounds some of which are again great for language learning sometimes just having reality or authentic media is at Wikimedia Commons there are just a great number of resources here and it's expanding, it's basically the back end for Wikipedia so if you've never been there before definitely check that out so. Okay so how much open how much opening license content yeah well I'm just not sure there's a lot of open content available but how much so how much alright so I get kind of happy when I see these numbers right there if you look right now there are close to 4 million licensed openly licensed videos on YouTube nearly 17 million free media files free and open I should say on the Wikimedia Commons more than 240 million openly licensed Flickr photos and 42,000 public domain books in Project Hootber this is just scratching the surface in large part of what's out there and basically that's to say that like so many people are sharing resources whether it's institutions, individuals governments every year the amount of content that people are making available and that was available to create new material is staggering you know this is like having millions of new building blocks at our disposal you know these individual pieces that we're talking about like photos and songs there are other assembled resources like learning module and presentations all of these materials are evolving right as we see that as we look at Wikimedia articles or remixed videos or even just seeing how people employ content in varieties of products and then share them again so sorry to hear that YouTube and Wikimedia are blocked Terran you've described that I don't know if that's a school policy or if that's something that's specific to country but that's difficult to hear so as we're talking about the number of OER that are available obviously we can talk about types we sort of highlighted some search engines or a variety of areas you can go to find what we would largely call these building blocks these images, these songs, these videos but as you look at types of OER there's obviously a great evolution into full fledged sort of comprehensive materials open textbooks in this case we've showcased some of the textbooks made available by the connections group in Houston open courseware we've got PowerPoints and audio and lecture notes and syllabi there's classroom activities and lesson plans that are available through that we even have a lot of resources for teaching language learning available here at the Coral and we'll talk more about that in a second it's amazing how many different types of resources are out there especially folks who are looking to learn a second language as well so what about open educational resources specific to language learning this is where this gets kind of exciting is that as we talk about communities that are stemming around the creation of OER there are an immense number of materials available specifically for language learners and teachers that really focus on this idea of adequately or even exceptionally learning a language again all these materials are geared for reuse and not just in the classroom but a lot of times outside of the classroom and so one of the couple of the resources that we want to highlight one is a database or a repository called Merlot this has a large collection of materials probably one of the larger collections of OER materials it spans a variety of disciplines but inside of language learning this resource is pretty amazing you've got the ability to sort of search by language you can find a variety of different kinds of materials that are both image based or even module based you will also find that this resource is amazing because in large part it employs this sort of curation principle there's an ability for people to review different resources giving ratings to ones which they've found to be appropriate for their contacts or just great resources in general which means that these resources in large part are rising to the top so we invite you to check that resource out another repository type is called OER Commons this is again one of the large repositories of OER content it's specifically focused on OER as I mentioned in the last but Merlot is not necessarily all OER but this resource OER Commons is the language collection here is small but because it's one of the sort of most well known repositories that collection grows unfortunately you can't browse by language but again this initiative is sort of pretty amazing it's been around for a long while and it's constantly evolving making new tools that enable people to contribute in remix materials quite easily this is just another sort of look at that you can again browse by language the sort of different age groups, different context areas, things like that and they also have a lot of great resources for people to learn more about what OER are and how to implement them and teacher training and what not another great resource for those of you who teach or are interested in learning about less commonly taught languages or Lictils is a resource that's been made available by the University of California in Los Angeles or UCLA it's called the Language Materials Project and this is again this is a fantastic resource there's not a ton of material in here but again this is a growing community practice and as more people know about it hopefully more people contribute one other resource I want to highlight is Wikiversity it's similar to that of the Wikimedia Commons it's similar sort of structure and finding things again really kind of good at finding more specific content toward these sort of as we talked about images or small little activities for you to use in the classroom but why I kind of want to highlight it is that it's also kind of a really interesting growing community of individuals who contribute and draw from it one of the cool resources from over the pond in the UK is an initiative called the Language Box I haven't had a lot of time to play with it but the Language Box is in large part blending this idea of both finding content but also a place for folks, teachers and learners and whomever it might be to store, manage and publish content and then allowing you to the tools to basically publish those materials on the web and then share those materials that you create with others so I definitely encourage people to take a look at that resource and again it's probably growing as individuals in Europe probably contribute to that not just in the US so another one from across the pond is a place called Jordan and I apologize for the screenshot there it's covered up but similar to that of the Language Box but this one is more of a repository of content and focuses on providing folks with tools and resources to learn more about implementing OER so these are some of the others that we're not going to have time to talk about today but I encourage you to sort of take note of this slide, download the presentation and grab some of these images and then visit these sites the orange grove is out of Florida it's content that's largely created by and pulled from Florida teachers you've got LaMille which is again a sort of interesting way to find content Kariki, Jordan, open stacks college for text books, connections for text books and then SlideShare, I mean this is a community that has persisted for I don't even know how long but quite a long time I didn't imagine it would be around this long but thousands and thousands of millions of resources available there again some of them are not open but many of them are and again you'll find our presentation on here and others who link to these sort of resources that way alright so another place to find OER is obviously in the context of the language resource centers there are obviously more language resource centers than these 15 that are displayed here but these are the 15 that are federally funded by the Department of Education and inside of that we have a variety of different ways for you to search across what resources that these language resource centers have they're focused on free resources, Coral is one of the few language resource centers that is specifically focused on OER but this is a place where there's our getting into the field and you'll probably see a lot more open content there so check it out at the language resource centers and the national foreign language resource centers I'm going to stop and maybe brag a little I'm not going to spend too much time on it but if you are interested in resources you probably already know a lot about some of the ones that we create we have a variety of amazing textbooks basically workbooks that go along with courses we've got materials that help folks in a variety of different languages whether it be Slavic languages or romance languages we have resources that are available in Arabic and Chinese so if you haven't spent enough time on our website please go there and you're going to find a great open educational resource language learning content and again not all of it's open but a lot of it is one project that you're going to hear a little bit more about in our third webinar is a new project that we've been working on called SpinTechs and it's basically a video archive that basically allows people to watch videos and learn how people are using Spanish in Texas but also basically a way for others to sort of use this as a platform for potentially using it for other languages like again you're going to hear a lot more about that as we talk about it with the project directors and the project manager of that coming up in a few weeks alright so one other resource that is not associated with the language resource centers but is part of sort of an institutional initiative of Laurel kind of playing on that notion of a parrot in Spanish but it's called Language Open Resources Online and this is a fantastic resource specific to language teaching and has an interface that much like a language box as we described has an interface for you to create an account and publish and share your own resources and most importantly here you can actually connect with other language teachers throughout the globe which is again part of this notion of communicating and collaborating with colleagues. One other kind of really interesting project out west in Washington, Washington State is a project of images that are collected as the culturally authentic pictorial lexicon and it's kind of like in large part the flicker for language professionals. Now there's really great reality and it kind of has other ways of understanding how images are sort of used in the context of a certain you know sort of language situations so we invite you to check that out as well. Now one of the more convenient ways I think and sometimes about finding out what great resources are are using social media two of the hashtags that we recommend that you start with to sort of get familiar with what might be out there are hashtag Lang Chat and another called Ed Chat. Now you're not going to find specific OER resources here but from time to time that you come up but it's also a great place to ask the question what folks are creating or using OER in the context of language teaching or learning another community to begin to look at I think there are many more but some of those that we're kind of excited about are on Google Plus in the Google community sort of part of it and one of which is the foreign language teaching group another one called creating open classroom and another one called pure I can't even say it. There you go inaction so check those out and these are again just a tip of the iceberg and I think that's sometimes all you need to begin finding your own exploration into finding resources but having these conversations in these places I think is an important place to start and but I can't stress enough sort of the importance of just talking to colleagues. Those of you who are here today I wish we could share the persistence list so you could see one another but we couldn't find a way to do that somehow but just talking to one another about what each are wanting and what do you want to create just the smallest amount of sort of inquiry into maybe what others are working on would lead you to a neat collaborative exercise that can happen with your colleagues it can happen with students. Many of you probably are in positions where you have such eager students who want to create projects and what better way to sort of form a collaborative exercise than to say that this resource can be used by others and actually put into play and become a learning resource that others can modify as we talked about sort of get on those online groups and find out who else is doing some of this stuff. Wow, thanks Garen. That was a lot. Okay, I do see that there are many open resources available but what are some of the difficulties people are likely to encounter while searching for materials? Yeah, so I think the first thing to really mention is that search isn't perfect. Every year it's getting better but there's not a guarantee in any one of these search engines or resources that we've pointed out here that you're going to find exactly what you're looking for. But there's no excuse to simply wait around, I think and just wait for a publishing company or someone else to push something at you. There are going to be places where there's just not enough metadata that comes along with these resources to in other words allow people to find these resources easily. Different repositories use different APIs so it's difficult to build other applications and other things on top of it to make it easy to find there's lots of broken links, there's old links, there's one that have expired, contents old in some cases, right? And as sort of we've been talking about throughout the presentation or at least early on some folks had questions about is this actually an open resource? Sometimes resources that are created and shared seem like they should be open but someone forgets to put a license on it. You see presentations where people license the presentation but you see an image of something that Coca-Cola commercial or a bear or who knows what and it's difficult for you to understand how that can be licensed but you're going to come up against these difficulties and there's questions but I think it's important to realize that there are folks who you can ask about this and hopefully we can be a resource for folks who have questions about that. Karen, we did have somebody asking what an API is and I actually wrote the answer in the chat room but most of the time there's a way to communicate to a library, a code library to accomplish something. I don't know how to put it better. Yeah, so this is where it's handy to sort of look up online on Wikipedia and there's going to be a great entry on APIs and maybe we can share it. But if I find an open resource and I want to begin the process of creating one, which is have the desire to contextualize it to my classroom, are there platforms for editing, remixing and sharing? Yeah, so some of the resources that we talked about earlier like Jisk and language box and Loro have built into their platforms and ability for folks to share resources. They share and also contextualize and remix. I do want to highlight though, one is an initiative by the Shuttleworth Foundation which is a pretty great tool. It's called OER Pub and it's basically an open source tool for authoring, adapting, remixing and publishing content and then again delivering these to the web and to various devices. So they're taking that a step further realizing that as we talk about technology being in large part ubiquitous or at least going mobile for a lot of folks in the world that content should be available on those devices. But also it's still stressed that reality of materials being in print. So allowing for folks to create content that can be easily downloaded and printed. Connections is another resource we talked about earlier and based at Ryze University in Houston. We've got a new project called OpenStacks College which is about creating textbooks. But at the same, our open textbooks, but the connections platform is the original sort of platforms for folks to begin uploading content and putting their materials into what are called modules where you can organize courses and reports and books and other content. And then largely put those into things that you want for your classroom or to collaborate with others. What's neat about this is that there's a really large community that sits behind this and a lot of resources that go into developing. There's actually going to be, I think, a new version of this soon, so pay attention to that. I won't have time to go into a lot of these, but there are a lot of other places. If you're doing videos, check out YouTube. There's a YouTube editor. OER Commons, as we mentioned earlier, has one. TEDEd has a great place to explore remixing content. OpenTapestry is a renewed initiative out of an organization in Utah that is also doing something quite similar where you can discover and adapt and share learning resources and then organize your content into what's called an open tapestry. But I think what's important to realize here too is that standard Office Suite products and things work just fine to remake content and so do Google Docs. So just make sure to keep in mind the simple resources as well. At the end of the presentation, are there any final thoughts? I want to get back to, in large part, what we talked about earlier. We hear a lot from teachers. One of the things we often hear is, I'm looking for authentic learning materials and materials that will make my classroom more vibrant. My students, let's say, more engaged or my lessons more contextualized and relevant to my students' learning experience. Many of the folks who talk to us describe searches that they conduct online and the time they spend looking through publishers offerings. Basically to describe that finding resources is difficult. There's just so much out there, whether it be videos or music or photos or just different learning modules. Even when they do find something that might work, it's just sometimes a limited version or a trial version. Something that the teacher might have to purchase or just can't modify to fit the context of the classroom. That's what OER are addressing on one level, is this reality that OER is about this community of practice about people sharing, about giving people tools to create content that makes sense for their situations. I want to encourage people, I guess to continually search out OER and the communities of practice around them. As we go forward in search of OER to begin to continually talk to people about what OER is, how others are using them in practice. Again, get back to that understanding that learning is not a linear pathway, but something that's quite organic. I also want to stress that open educational resources aren't the solution. There are resources. They are a tool. They're a part of this transformation in learning. There are things that can be utilized to help cultivate this environment of learning and growth and basically allow people to develop their own solutions and to contextualize or personalize these resources to their own learning contexts. I think it's also just important to note then that everything starts with sharing and maybe we'll just end on this is to say that tens of thousands of people every day are creating content and open content. There are organizations that have this as a part of their mission. There are people who dedicate their lives to basically repurposing and sharing materials. I think it's just important to note that there are millions of resources at your fingertips for you to use and employ. I know it takes time to find it, but they're out there. The ability for you to find these resources is getting better. If you're frustrated by not being able to find certain things, just keep talking and maybe be a part of something that's improving that. But know that as search gets better, we're going to be able to find materials that fit our context all that much better. I can't stress the importance enough of basically just trying out and continually to encourage you to generate material. Use content creation tools that enable sharing when you're building projects or building lesson plans like Google Docs so that you can easily share that material with someone else. Then basically when you're getting ready to share it, make sure you license it. Go to Creative Commons and find out how you can make use of their licenses and make your material have an impact and being very clear as to how other people can use it. I would love to basically say to just keep on encouraging other colleagues and students that you have to share their material. Even if all you do is share links to open content or just promote the open community, that's an important part of this. I think maybe something that's quite interesting is basically just support and comment on OER when you see it. Say thanks for sharing on a presentation or comment on things on SlideShare or wherever it might be to say thanks for doing this. There's no bad way to participate in this community even if it's criticism or if it's complimentary. I think what I'll finish up with though is saying is that we haven't even come close to tapping the full potential of OER. That we need to help more people understand that these materials are not just free. They can also create communities of teachers and learners who collaborate on their continuous improvement and that that's the real magic in the actual reuse and remix. As you go forward in finding resources and finding resources perhaps leave with this thought that it's also about you contextualizing those rebuilding and then sharing those back and helping build back into this community. With that, I know that we're closing in on our hour. I just wanted to mention again for everybody who had the chance to see that in the chat room that we'll have an upcoming webinar session next Wednesday June the 19th again at 3pm Central Standard Time and we will hear there about the practice of using and teaching with OER. A lot of you have mentioned that would be of interest to you so this will just be the natural next step in this discussion. Again for those of you who have had a little bit of an issue with getting the CEUs or CMPs or CMEs or whatever we're calling them we'll be in touch with you that we'll go through this chat history here and find out what we need to do to get you the certificates. So thank you for attending and we'll see you all next time. So thank you very much. If there are any questions we can take them right now and guys we'll see you next week. Yeah, that's right. I also want to take the time to thank Darren Ponds for presenting and thank Natalie Chilk or Steinville Generator for being the wonderful technical chat room host as well as the host of the session.