 So, welcome everybody to two talks in this session that are both devoted to the teaching of Italian. And our first speakers are both from the University of Pittsburgh, Lorraine Denman and Chiara Monterra, and the title of their talk is A New Complete OER for First Year Italian. So go ahead, Lorraine and Chiara. Thank you so much, and thank you for having us here. Delighted to be able to present and also learn from our colleagues. So, you know, the reason for which we created this OER, the reasons for which I think are now common to us all to everyone here today. Number one, first and foremost, it was a question of accessibility of providing equal access for really what is a kind of niche textbook industry. So we find that most textbooks in Italian, especially for first year courses, are quite expensive. We also wanted to get away from a kind of monolithic, monocultural representation of Italian. And we also wanted to look at aspects of diversity and inclusion across the board, whether they be linguistic, whether they be addressing students own particular identities and intersection and intersectionalities and so on. We also have found so University of Pittsburgh is our one institution. You know, it traditionally was a regional school, but our demographics have changed quite a bit. We're now a kind of larger East Coast school. And so we found that a lot of our students were coming in with more linguistic experience, that is, so they're not taking a language class for the first time and that most of our students were already taking or had already taken another romance language such as Spanish or French, either in high school or at the University of Pittsburgh. So we wanted to tailor our curriculum to that very specific kind of group. So people who have studied romance languages before. And so I'll tell you about that in just a second. And then we also wanted to find something that we could use that would be online and something that would be compatible with our LMS, which is Canvas. And then we also wanted maximum flexibility. So we wanted to be able to change or switch out topics as as, you know, the course evolves and the curriculum evolves as new topics in in popular culture or in politics or society come up. So we wanted to be able to, you know, kind of be as flexible as possible with what we were presenting to students. And so the question of why Canvas Commons happens to be a happy coincidence, really. I had created a PDF version of a kind of grammar manual that we were sharing just with students was never published as an OER. And that PDF was used in conjunction with initially Schoology and then Blackboard, which was our LMS at the time. However, Canvas came to pit. So we left Blackboard and adopted Canvas as our LMS over the last academic year. And so in that moment of transition, my colleague, Keata Montaner and I decided to move that course that had been on Blackboard, housed on Blackboard to Canvas and then also to Canvas Commons. And so we completed the Canvas Commons version over last summer. And for a multitude of reasons, well, you know, for when we had the support of the University of Pittsburgh, they have a small grant program for faculty developing OERs. We also were getting a lot of training on Canvas as as Pitt made this transition. So it just kind of, you know, was the right moment. We also saw that Canvas did a lot that, you know, some things that Blackboard really couldn't do for us. And so we we seized that opportunity in posts and materials. Now, the downfall to, of course, creating an OER in this COVID year was that we had limited access to campus and campus resources. And so this version that we present here, there are no videos, for example. And eventually we would like to include things like that. But essentially, you know, Canvas Commons allowed us to create something that was multimedia, that has audio files, that has practice exercises that my colleague will show us in just a second. It's, you know, easy to use, endlessly adaptable. And so those were very, very kind of appealing components. And anyone can use Canvas Commons, of course. If you're an educator, you can create a free educator account and import the entire course and all of the exercises and materials and assessments as well. Before handing over to Chiara, I just wanted to mention very briefly. So the first course is structured weekly. And so every week there's a different topic or theme. And the first half of the class is really kind of that here and now language, right? So they're describing the college experience or describing their own surroundings, their living spaces and so on. The second half of the class focuses more on Italian experiences and it moves into more areas in which we can explore content based instructional methodology. The second semester is composed of two week modules in which students learn about a particular topic such as made in Italy or Italian travel and so on. And then within those modules, they're learning and reviewing grammatical structures from the previous course and the previous lessons and then building their linguistic skills and competencies. So now I'm going to hand it off to Chiara, who will demonstrate and give us a little tour of the OER itself. Thank you, Lorraine. Let me quickly share my screen here. That's great. You can see my screen, right? Perfect. So as Lorraine was saying, I'm going to show you a little bit how we designed, especially Italian one, Italian two is quite similar. So from our homepage, this is really the landing page for everything the students are going to need to access for our classes. So the first part is mostly our syllabus with all you need to know within a syllabus, you know, expectation, grading system and so on. Some resources in terms of dictionary and some resources in terms of fun things to do. We tend to update this, you know, this these are like lists of movies on Netflix and so on. And then on the second part of the page, there is the actual course material and it's divided by weeks. And as you can see, every week as a title that refers to the topic. OK, so for example, I'm going to show you week four. Andiamo a casa. So this is a typical week page. So the topic here is the house. We included here both the grammar and cultural material. So we're going to talk about the differences in Italian houses, American houses. At the top, we have always the objectives of the week. And then we start always with vocabulary with plenty of images to make it definitely more student friendly. Then the vocabulary is also listed. And here you can hear my amazing voice saying out loud all the vocabulary. L'appartamento, il bagno, la camera dal letto. We wanted to include all of these because we wanted the students to be able how to pronounce correctly all these words before coming to class. After the vocabulary, there is always at least one activity just to immediately re-employ the vocabulary and review the vocabulary. Just learn this activity is called pratica. And we decided to divide the different activities we created inside our our courts in different types of activities. So we have pratica, pratica are activities that wants to wants the student to review immediately one single topic. So after every topic, we have at least one pratica, but usually even more. Then we have, as you can see, so here, for example, we have adjectives. And after those, we have several pratica. After that, we're going to have something called controllo. Controllo is going to include all the material the students already saw in the pratica. So it's going to be a little more comprehensive. We have, of course, charts and we usually close with a parliamo. Parliamo is a speaking assessment. So at the end of every week, there is one parliamo. There is a very short speaking assessment on the topic of the week. We also included quizzes. These are quizzes that the students should take at home. And unlike pratica and controllo, they are only one attempt in a limited time and so on. So the kind of quizzes that when we are physically in class, the students would take with pen and paper in like 10 minutes at the beginning of class, for example. We also have some longer activities. They're called progetti. And those progetti are just for this class, just four, three even. So for example, the first is just presentations. This is going to be two weeks in the class. So the students would have acquired enough to present themselves to another person and to briefly talk about what they study and what they do in their daily life, for example. And usually we try to include in pratica, controllo and progetti all the different skills. So usually there is some listening activity. They have to respond to a listening activity. They have to read something and then write something. Most part of pratica are machine graded and also controllo are usually machine graded. Progetti, on the other hand, are usually, you know, something they have to write. Sometimes it's a small presentation. Sometimes it's an oral presentation. Sometimes is the typical essay, you know, the one page essay that they have to write. So it's going to be graded by the instructor. I think I explained, more or less, the gist about Italian one. Italian two, similarly, is organized by weeks, as Loren was saying, is organized bi-weekly. So we usually work the first week on vocabulary. So for example, if you take shopping, the first of the two weeks is going to be on vocabulary, in which we review grammar they already studied in the past. That makes sense with the vocabulary. And in the second week, we're going to... Here starts the second week of this module. We're going to include grammar, new grammar. So with the new grammar, we're going to include the vocabulary from the previous week, you know, in a scaffolding kind of style. So the students don't feel they are, you know, shawered with too much new material at the same time. Yeah, I also just wanted to mention, if I could jump in here, Keara, that we focus more on practices from second language acquisition and applied linguistics. And so this whole first year is really... There's a lot of, you know, discrete grammatical elements, but we really kind of slowed down how much grammar that you might typically see in an Italian textbook. So in this first semester, we don't go beyond present tense verbs. In the second semester, we're focusing mostly on review of basic grammatical structures and present tense, and then including also past tense verbs, if it's at the prossimoni perfetto. So we really kind of, like I said, we kind of tailor it to how we think our students learn and in the best way possible. Yeah, exactly. And also another difference we have with Italian too, is that we included also another kind of activity called scriviamo. And it's just, you know, a very short writing assignment just to re-employ the grammar and the vocabulary they learn during the two weeks. So it's gonna be not a project kind of long assignment, but a very little thing that students can do very easily. Yeah, we only have about one more minute. I just wanted to say that we've collected some student feedback and it's been overwhelmingly positive. Canvas, you know, like any kind of LMS or any kind of system is not 100% perfect or ideal, but for our purposes, it seems to be working well. And yeah, so I don't know if there are any questions. Yes, I have the links. Yeah, I put the links in there too, so they should be up earlier in the chat as well. I'll thank you, Lauren. Why did you present it each, let's see, just so we were thinking about the kind of structures that we were learning or teaching in class. And so we have in, for example, in Italian too, we're using a kind of scaffolded system where we're reviewing previously studied grammar in with new vocabulary, right? And reviewed vocabulary as well. And then we have a second week where we're looking at more advanced structure. So it's kind of like almost the idea of a bloom taxonomy. We're going from previously studied material. It's all very highly scaffolded. Okay, thank you very much. That was fascinating. And again, on a Canvas course, another example of Canvas being used to house an OER.