 Hello, Dibbidi Dan. My name is Christian Hilchi. I teach check at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm also the author of Reality Check. Reality Check is an open check curriculum that I designed here. It was actually something that I was hired for in addition to teaching check language classes. We wanted to create a textbook of check that would not only be used here at UT, but that would be available to anybody in the world to use. So Reality Check is actually a textbook that's under an open license, meaning that anybody can use the materials, share them, they can modify them, etc. And it's completely free. So there's no high costs associated with buying a textbook for your class. And individuals who are maybe interested in taking check or learning a little bit about the check language can just open it up on their web browser and utilize the materials. Now when I started the project, I really didn't actually know how big the project would end up being. And as you can see from some of these numbers here, it really ended up being a huge project. So just the online grammar and cultural lessons are over 850 pages. There are nearly 500 Canvas quizzes. There is an activity book that numbers over 500 pages as well. Workbook with homework that is over 270 pages. I created more than 245 interview videos, math videos, and tons of Quizlet sets for vocabulary learning. Now I'm going to be talking about all of these aspects today. And I'm going to be showing you how you can access them yourself, whether you're taking the course at a university, you're interested in teaching from materials, or if you're just interested in using these materials from home. So as I was mentioning before, this is an open educational resource, or OER. And the cool thing about OERs are what freedoms they give us. So when you buy a textbook, you are able to just have that textbook for your use, but there's no real freedom for you to be able to, for example, reuse that material, or share it with others. You can't revise those materials, and for example, create your own version of them, and share it with others, and you can't mix it with other things. And these are some of the things that OERs give us the freedom to do. This ultimately ends up being somewhat of an issue. For example, a checked textbook is created, or a textbook for really any subject, and then the author moves on to some other project, and the textbook never gets updated. The goal of this project was not only to create something that gives users a lot of freedom, and how they use it, and something without any cost, but also something that lives on after I have decided maybe to work on something else. So the hope with this is that this is a textbook that will exist on, and will ultimately inspire others to take parts of it, maybe modify them, and then continue to share those with others. This is how you will typically access RealityCheck if you go through the website. This is, for example, what a table of contents for Unit 3 looks like at the top. And one of the cool things about the textbook is I really wanted to make sure that it was accessible in whatever format is most convenient to users. So you can open up documents in Google Drive, you can actually save it to your Google Drive as well, and create your own copy that way, and then modify it any way you want. You can write your own notes in it. You can download it as a PDF if that's your favorite way to consume the content, or as a Word doc. So really the idea was to have as much freedom for the content as possible. Now the project itself was sponsored by the Center for European Studies, as well as the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, my home department. And I worked extensively with Coral, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning, a really wonderful center here at the University of Texas at Austin that helps instructors create and share their materials using open licenses. So oftentimes people ask, why did you create the name Reality Check, or what a creative name or what a cute name? I have to be honest, I hate puns based off of check. I tend to avoid them, but I keep running into reasons to use them. And in fact, actually when I was hired for the job, they asked me, what do you think you'll call this book? And I said, anything but a check pun, and of course that's exactly where I landed. But there was actually some pretty good reasons why I chose the title Reality Check. The first part of it was pretty early on in the project, I figured out that it would be really good to have reality style interviews, interviews with a lot of different checks. And they'd be answering questions for each of the units. And as I was putting them together, they really felt a lot like the kind of interviews that you get in a reality style TV show. The unit questions, these are available, every unit in the text book has a set of questions associated with them. These are just some of the questions, for example, for the food unit. These are basic everyday questions that you would expect to be able to answer. What kind of food do you like? What do you like to drink? What's your favorite cuisine? What do you often eat? What do you ever eat? Do you drink coffee or tea? Do you know how to cook? Do you like to cook? So the goal of the course is to learn how to answer these questions in check. And so that involves learning a lot of vocabulary, grammar, structures, and also learning a lot about Czech culture. And so these videos, these interview videos, here's another example of one. The question is, what do you do when your head hurts? Does my head never hurt? Not at all. Fortunately, my head doesn't hurt very often, but probably the best thing is to drink water. When my head hurts, when my head hurts a lot, I take some powder, some kind of tablet against the pain in my head. When my head hurts, I start drinking a lot of water. Do you have any powder? If it doesn't help, I take some powder. So if we look at this video, it was a collection of different native speakers answering the question, what do you do when you have a headache? And so this is really important because our students also want to be able to say, what do you have to do when you have a headache? The speakers give all sorts of answers. For example, I never have a headache or when I have a headache, I take some sort of pain pill or I drink water. Really a great opportunity for our students to learn a little bit about Czechs, as well as also how to say these various things. This notion of reality, however, started to take on deeper meanings. And I started to think about how we also really need to focus on some non-normative or non-canonical aspects of Czech language and culture. And the big thing with Czech in terms of language is that a lot of the ways that we focus on teaching Czech and this is something we see over and over in Czech textbooks is there's this huge focus just on learning the endings and learning the standard endings, etc. This is not necessarily always, however, the case of how people speak. So they don't necessarily use all these endings or the precise endings, etc. Additionally, Czech is what's known as a high variety and a low variety of the language. Basically, everyday dialect and the standard language. This complicates matters because people rarely actually speak using standard Czech. They tend to use a lot of their own dialect forms. These are things that were coming up in the interview videos that I filmed, as well as more videos that I found, for example, on YouTube and other sites, which I'll talk about in a little bit. So the goal really was maybe we should not necessarily just focus on the standard, but we should also expose our students to the everyday variety of Czech that they're going to encounter whenever they meet Czechs. Additionally, I came into this project really thinking that the most important thing was we need to learn all of the grammatical intricacies of Czech. What I'm showing you here is this very initial outline of what was going to be in the project. And as you can see here circled on the left, grammar was number one. It was really for me this goal to make sure that we got all the important grammatical points. But this isn't necessarily how we learn language. We really use language as a tool to achieve goals. And we don't necessarily think about, well, I'm going to learn a bunch of tools and then what goals can I achieve with them. And so really it was about actually sort of focusing in on what actually do I need to learn to be able to achieve the goals that I have. And as I stated before, the goals of this course are being able to talk about yourself and people in your lives. And specifically about answering these questions related to that. So what do we actually need? What tools, what vocabulary do we need to actually achieve those goals? And I really started to realize that reality is actually a lot of the things that you can find on YouTube, the sort of everyday life that is represented by checks that are going on there and just talking about their daily activities or their opinions or whatever. Additionally, as I said before, reality is looking at how checks actually speak. Really focusing on that and not necessarily focusing on some sort of preconceived notion of these are the topics that we have to have. These are the grammar things that are important to cover in a first year check language classroom. So the curriculum is organized into 10 chapters. Currently, I actually only do the first eight chapters in the first year of check. The additional chapters were planned for the first year. But I found that I had created so much content already just in the first eight chapters that that's all we could really manage to get through in that time. So there are two extra chapters. Some additional chapters are planned and are currently in the works. But for now, those are the 10 chapters that are available. And the way that the courses is organized is as a flipped classroom. This is an example of blended learning. So a flipped classroom basically takes a lot of those aspects that are traditionally maybe part of the instruction in the classroom. And instead puts them before you actually even meet for class. So the course is actually broken up into a pre-class and in-class and a post-class component. So the pre-class component is what you would do, for example, on Sunday evening before you go into class on Monday. When you get into class on Monday, there's in-class activities. And then finally, after you get out of class on Monday, there's a post-class. So it's all part of this grand strategy to prepare you for class, to get you in class working on a lot of those concepts and communicates a lot of those ideas that we want to communicate. And then post-class really gets you to build on those skills that you learned in the pre-class and the in-class components. If you were to click on Unit 1, for example, and go down, you would find how these three... If you want to find more information about how the course is organized, you can go, for example, to any of the units. Here we're going to look at Unit 1. And if you were to scroll down a little bit, you would find a description of the pre-class, in-class, and post-class components. Additionally, if you want more information about how to use the materials, you can read Using the Reality Check Curriculum, which I've put an arrow to down here at the bottom. So pre-class components, introduction to new vocabulary, various quizlets to help you learn the vocabulary, grammar explanations, culture, and canvas quizzes, which help take all those things that you learned and give you some feedback. Did you actually understand them correctly? And the advantages of having this pre-class is that you can take as little or as long as you need to learn the various concepts. You can repeat things. So every canvas quiz can be repeated multiple times. You get that immediate feedback. Do I understand this or do I not? I also get feedback as the instructor, if you're in my class, for example, and so I can see, well, how well did you do? Maybe we need a little bit more time in class to review those concepts. And then as a sort of eventual goal, it'd be really cool. And I say this as something that actually doesn't exist yet, but it would be really cool in the future to have individualized assignments for certain students who need some extra help, for example, with a concept, whereas maybe other students are understanding it pretty well and so that they can actually be pushed a little bit further. So here is an example of what pre-class looks like on Canvas. You can see all of the various aspects of the course have been laid out. And then if you access the materials through the course website, realitycheck.org, you can also see the pre-class components here on the left. Now, one of the other aspects is that Quizlet is used really extensively in the course, whether for flashcards or learning exercises, or various listening or matching exercises, et cetera. It's a really cool resource that I've added to make sure that every student has the opportunity to really practice all those things, especially vocabulary, all the new words that you're learning and not just have to go off of some long list. Additionally, I teach grammar and culture in these pre-class lessons. So here you can see learning various vocabulary items, learning how to tell time, or learning how to talk about what subjects might be enjoyable to you in school. As I mentioned before, there are Canvas quizzes. These are ways of checking your knowledge, whether it's multiple choice or fill in the blank type exercises, true, false, et cetera. Typically the kinds of things on here are things that can be auto graded, and so you get immediate feedback with them. So, when you get into class, the in-class components often involve some sort of speaking activity or some sort of game, et cetera. I've created lots of opportunities for instructors to go, and for example here, if you see 4.6a, this is Pexsesso, a matching game, right next to it you can see download a set of cards here, or if you look at the exercise here on the right, for a slideshow with even more photos click here. So the idea has been to provide instructors with all the resources that they would need to create a successful classroom. The in-class activity book also uses a lot of videos. You've already seen a lot of pictures being used, but also videos that were made available on YouTube using an open license. Here's an example of a girl showing three different work outfits that she wants her viewers to be able to rate, which one do they like the most, which one they like the least, and this was a natural opportunity, for example, to get my students or anybody who uses these materials to basically do the same task, give your opinion on these outfits, and so that's what we do in class. What outfit do you like the most, what outfit do you like the least, and why? And of course, checks like to talk about all sorts of topics out there, for example, chocolate addiction and what kind of chocolate you like the most. These are fun little topics to bring up in class. It gets people wanting to speak and really express themselves in the language. Now post-class, as I said, this is building upon the pre-class and the in-class, and it gives a lot of opportunity for active use of the language and creating with the language and reinforcing those skills that we learned in the pre-class and post-class, sorry, pre-class and in-class. So the post-class is typically found here on campus under post-class, Domazzi Ukol, homework 3.1, for example, and if you're looking on the course website, you'll find it to the right here, Domazzi Ukol as well, homework. These are homeworks that are available as Google Docs and printable, and so you can print them and fill them out and then turn them into your instructor or submit them online as an electronic document. Post-classes often involve, as I said, more opportunities to create with the language, whether it's answering questions about yourself or here's this activity in the middle, which gets you to write a postcard to friends or this activity on the right which gets students to talk about or write about who should hang out with who based off of common interests. It's also really important to utilize check language materials available over the internet, such as stores. We don't have to be in Prague to go into a check store. We can access this through our web browser. This is just one example of an assignment that gets students to go onto a grocery store website, in this case Tesco, and put items into their cart, plan a meal, and see how check items are sold, how they're described in check, etc. One of the things you've probably noticed is that there are a lot of images used throughout this course, and I really took advantage of the availability of a lot of openly licensed images, whether on Flickr or Wikimedia Commons or a host of other sites. Images are really important because we're learning lots of vocabulary and grammar, and we need to be able to connect those things to the concepts that they help describe. Pictures are that missing link, they're that really important thing that help connect those two together, and so I use them as much as possible. And I not only just use them as illustrations, but also let's have some fun with them. I created meme-like content using images to help learn words and phrases, and sometimes we can use this kind of content in a fun and playful way to learn grammar. Just one example, the third person plural that they form of to eat is a regular, yeti, but it looks like Jedi to everybody. So let's create a fun little way of memorizing that, because Jedi's eat too. Or the way that we say I like to sleep, or my head hurts in check, is a little different than we say in English. So some of these memes take advantage of that. Let's learn how to construct some of these concepts in check in a fun way. I also created a number of check cultural videos. These are largely revolve around various locations in Prague. I believe right now there's about a dozen videos. These two, one is on John Lennon's wall in Prague, and another one is a pretty popular restaurant, lokal bloha. And so these are really cool. They allow you to go on a map and click on various places and get a short video about that location. I also, as I've mentioned before, utilize a lot of video content that I found on the internet. So much of this was actually through vlogs. Vlogs or video blogs are really great, and they offer a lot of advantages to language instructors. What's cool about them is they're really a natural context for the speaker to be presenting information to their viewers. They address the viewer directly, and in a really natural way, because this is a natural way of communicating with people on the internet, we naturally view a lot of videos like this. This is normal now in our lives. These users typically are really passionate about their subject matter, and oftentimes the quality of the video is quite high. As a side note, you will have more content if you're a language instructor interested in creating content like this. There's more content than you could ever imagine doing anything with. So I really highly recommend these. When I found out about this, I immediately started to look at the users that were creating open videos and found that they tend to have so much content that it really will fill a whole page and more. So this had to become part of the curriculum. And there's a whole number of genres that really can be used from the very beginning. Here's just one example of a drone video. Drone videos give us not only a view of Prague, but they also let us practice vocabulary that we've been learning, describe things that we see, practice plural, practice descriptions, etc. So I really try to take advantage of these as much as possible. Whatever is available on the internet, whatever has been available to me to use freely under an open license, I've tried to integrate that into the course in a meaningful way. And so it was throughout the process of creating this textbook that I really started to learn to think open, open my mind to what I can do with the materials available to me, the pictures that I would find that are under an open license, the various videos that had been openly licensed on YouTube or Vimeo. And instead of having a preconceived notion like the table I showed you at the beginning with all the grammatical concepts that I thought were important, instead, look at what's out there. See what is important, what students will actually need to do to achieve the goals of asking and answering those questions about themselves, people in their lives, etc. When I learned to do that, I think is when I started to create a really effective textbook. And I like to liken this to a farmer's market. You may go into a farmer's market with some sort of preconceived notion, an idea, a recipe that you'd like to create. But when you get there, the vegetables that you had planned on maybe just aren't there that day. Maybe it's too late for tomatoes, the season is over. But you find some really fantastic other varieties of vegetables, cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, leeks, etc. In that kind of instance, what you can do is take those great ingredients and create something out of them. And that's what I try to do with this curriculum. So I hope you'll take a look at the reality check curriculum. There are a lot of materials here to learn, check, or if you're an instructor to teach, check with. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. And I hope you enjoyed this video. Thanks a lot. Goodbye. And that's good to know.