 My name is Carl Blythe from Coral Center for OER and Language Learning and this is the room you're in, Room B, which is our lightning round room. We're having 15-minute talks, people discussing their OER. It's my pleasure to introduce our first talk of the day. The title is Grins in los Deutsch, an OER curriculum for first-year German, and our two speakers, Britt Able from McAllister College and Amy Young from Central College. So you guys take it away. Good morning, everyone. I am sharing my screen here. There we go. Good morning. My name is Britt Able and I'm here with my colleague Dr. Amy Young to talk about Grins in los Deutsch, an open educational resource for German language instruction that we've been working on for about five years now. Grins in los Deutsch was born of a Facebook grant. A colleague of ours posted her frustrations with heteronormativity and sexism in beginning German textbooks. Amy, John, Dan, as did I. We were all keenly aware of the disconnect between what our students experienced in their daily lives and what was depicted in the learning materials that we brought into our classrooms. So we decided to do something about it. Grins in los Deutsch, or GD, as we like to call it, now exists as a WordPress website with HTML5 interactive activities, and it contains a full curriculum for first-year German language. The curriculum is divided into six modules or content areas, which you see here in the box to the right. Each module includes three units of increasing linguistic complexity. The units are basically like chapters that are broken down into daily lessons. And the lessons are each based on an authentic interview, photos, text, or a combination thereof. The lessons include activities that stress all four modalities, plus grammatical or linguistic structures and cultural components. Students go through and complete all of the unit one, so all the different content areas before going on to complete the second units in each module. In this way, the students are revisiting content areas and recycling vocabulary while they build on their previous learning. The curriculum is currently being piloted at six official pilot institutions, and we know it's being used in many additional classrooms. So in the process of developing the curriculum, there were four primary goals that we had to include diverse voices to have our content be freely available to everyone with a computer and internet access, to use newer interactive tools, and to expand publicly available content for language learners and instructors. So let's have a look at some of the perspectives that we include. As you saw on the Facebook rant a few moments ago, we started with specific concerns about gender and sexuality. We took opportunities to include images of the LGBT community starting very early in the curriculum, and it's threaded throughout. We also aim to teach inclusive language so that our gender nonconforming and nonbinary students develop the skills that they need to talk about their own lives. We also want to accurately reflect the breadth of diversity represented in German speakers. Some German speakers learn German as a second or third or fourth language, and that is reflected in some of our content. We also have representations and content from people with a variety of abilities. This includes audio and video from people with disabilities, people living in collective housing with people with disabilities, and cultural information about accessibility in the German speaking world. And since German is a multifocal language, we include information about German as spoken by Germans, German as spoken by Austrians. We also include a number of words that are regional variations of either German or Austrian German. And then our second goal was open access. We felt very strongly that we wanted to have our content be open access. All of our activities, photos and videos are licensed with a Creative Commons license and are freely available to German language teachers and learners. This means that our students are not required to purchase a costly textbook, and students who cannot afford the textbook are not put at a disadvantage, something that was really well highlighted in that first presentation. And so as you may already know, Creative Commons licenses let content creators decide the circumstances under which their content may be used. As you can see at the bottom of this slide, Grendelsen Lowstoyage is licensed with a BYNCSA license, which means that our content may be used with attribution for non-commercial purposes, as long as the person using it also shares their materials under the same license. Our third goal was that we were eager to use the format of a website to seamlessly integrate audio and video directly into the lessons. And we were also excited to explore the suite of H5P HTML5 package activities available. And you can see a few examples here. These activities provide interactive ways for students to engage with the content, including standard multiple choice, true balls and fill in the blanks, but also some kind of funner and more creative activities like flip cards, drag and drop, flash cards and hotspots, which are all really useful formats for learning and practicing vocabulary, for example. H5P activities also support our goal of open access and publicly available content. Since these are, this is a free plugin, and each of the activities can be downloaded and reused and remixed. And you can see that at the bottom bar of all of these activities, there's this little reuse button that people can click on and just download the activity and mix it into their own classroom or use for their own learning. And that leads into our final goal. We wanted to build the bank of materials that are publicly available for German teachers. So we're archiving all of the content that we gathered and created in various open formats. So first, all of our edited videos, and as you can see, we have more than 135 of them right now, and that number is still growing. They're available on our Vimeo page, on the kinds in those Dutch Vimeo page, and instructors can link to or even download any of the videos for their own use in the classroom. Similarly, all of our photos and illustrations are housed in the Content DM database at McAllister College. We're still in the time consuming process of uploading batches of images, and it's time consuming because each image is tagged with keywords in both English and German for easy searching. So the big question is, how are we doing this, especially given that we are not being paid for these efforts? So this harkens back to the last question from the from the opening keynote talk. We're not being paid, and we're not earning any income from the curriculum itself. The answer is twofold to how we're getting this done. Grant funding is really important. And the fact that we received a digital advancement grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities was key. We've also received a number of smaller local grants from our institutions or communities. But I would say even more crucial to this project is collaboration. We have so many people around the world who have contributed and contributed to and dedicated many hours to this project, including many different offices on the McAllister College campus, where our NEH grant is based. We've received tremendous support from the DeWitt Wallace Library at McAllister, which actively encourages the development of open educational resources. They're doing a lot on campus to kind of encourage the development and use of OER, including small grants for instructors who are adapting OER materials. We've also received a lot of support from the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative on campus. And we were really fortunate to collaborate with a professor of drawing on campus who worked with a team of student artists to create custom illustrations for this project. That was super fun. Our board of authors and editors has worked collaboratively to shape and author the curriculum. Amy and I, as the co-pIs of this project are presenting today, but all of these people have contributed equally to Krenzenlos Deutsch. And we frequently write and present about the project together. We want to acknowledge all the other ways in which colleagues have contributed to the project. The list of acknowledgments and thank yous goes on and on. And we also want to express our gratitude for the financial support that's made this project possible. And at this point, we are looking forward to a discussion. We talked quickly and briefly thinking that it would be nice to have time for discussion. So we welcome questions. I think I will stop sharing right now so that I can see the chat more easily. Now I need to open up the chat. Let's see. I haven't seen any questions come through yet. Yeah, those illustrations. So we spent time as part of the NEH grant. I'll just explain that we spent, we brought the whole team to Vienna for a month. And we did a number of video interviews and took masses of photos that are now in that content DM site. While we were doing that, and actually over the course of three or four summers, we were able to get money from McAllister College through the collaborative faculty student research program to develop the illustrations. And I will say too that the interviews, the video interviews that we have as part of the curriculum, were developed over a series of years. So we had several phases of the project with different teams going abroad and doing interviews. The NEH grant was just for this project specifically, but of course it included our whole team of authors and editors. So it brought people in from all over the world. Amy, maybe you want to jump in and take one of these questions too? So let's see. I just pasted the link in the chat. I think I spelled everything correctly. What did we use to organize the curriculum? We used a lot of Google docs, Google sheets, types of things. At one point when we were in Vienna, we sat down with big pieces of poster paper and put post-it notes. That's how it all started and then that got transferred into a more electronic version. Let's see. Maintenance beyond the grant period. That's one of the things that we have actively looked for. So we've figured out the funding, in terms of maintaining the website, because it's not prohibitively expensive. We've also thought about leadership for the project in terms of future, because at some point, Britt and I are going to want to retire. So we have actively sought collaborators who are younger academics and younger colleagues. Maybe I could jump in and talk about tracking student progress with regards to the online activities. And I'm going to be honest about this. This is a challenge. So the H5P activities on the website allow students to do the activities and get immediate feedback. But I do not get feedback about how the students are doing. So we've worked in various different ways with this. Depending on our LMS, our learning management systems, the H5P activities work easily or work less easily. I've been fortunate that Moodle is my LMS and I can just click that little reuse button on the H5P activities, download the activity, upload it into Moodle. It automatically speaks to the grade book in Moodle. So what I typically do is assign, we work on a lesson in class. There is an expansion to each lesson for homework. I assign reviewing the lesson, doing the expansion to my students. And we have daily low stakes quizzes. I just select one or two of the activities that they were supposed to do for homework and that they consult correct. And I just plunk it into Moodle and we spend three minutes in class doing that exercise as a check. I also collect homework that has been written down and I ask students to kind of just write a little summary of what they understood and what they struggled with. Amy has had a different experience with H5P activities. So our LMS is Blackboard and Blackboard does not play as nicely with H5P and so I acquired an H5P.com account which is a paid account and that has allowed me to upload all of our activities into H5P.com and then anyone with an H5P.com account can access them. I can embed them into Blackboard as assignments and then the grade automatically goes into the grade book. It takes a couple more steps on the front end but it's really slick once it's done. There's a question here that I think is really important we tried to build page debates about captioning and what we have are transcripts that are available because of the necessity for for developing listening skills but we're happy to talk about more of that offline. Thank you.