 And so our first speaker, Elena Martín Monje from the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia from Spain is going to talk to us about an optional course in a master's program. Elena. Thank you. So good evening from Madrid. It's 7 p.m. here. And I'm just delighted to be taking part in this conference. And what I want to talk about today is how we have managed to introduce open language learning at my university as part of our master's program. So my university is the Distance Learning University in Spain. Just to give you an overview, our chancellor says that we are the biggest campus in Europe. Just because our methodology is blended learning, we blend onsite with online courses. So the way we are organized, we have what we call regional centers, which are like different faculties in our country. You can see that we have five different campuses. The teaching teams are based in Madrid. But then we have tutors all over Spain. And also, we have partner centers in 15 countries. For instance, in the US, we have a partner center in New York. So you can study at UNED from anywhere around the world. And of course, our strength is the virtual campus. So this course, Open Language Learning, is part of a master's program entitled Master Universitario de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación en la enseñanza y el tratamiento de lenguas. So basically, it tries to introduce ICT into the teaching and processing of foreign languages. And we have many students that join us as part of their professional development. It is an optional subject, and it is highly practical. I have to mention that it's one of the four subjects that are offered entirely in English in the master's program precisely because we want to attract more international students. It was introduced back in 2016 as a response to our students' interest in open educational resources and open practices in foreign languages. It accounts for 125 hours of student work. So we have a credit system in Europe that is ECTS. So it's five credits for us. It's taking place right now, what we call our second semester, until June. And it consists of five units. Now, of course, I don't have the time to show you every single unit, but the next slides are just a taster so that you get the flavor of what it looks like. So the first unit is entitled Open Educational Resources for Foreign Languages. We look, it's an introduction into OERs, and that's just an extract. They are shown how they can engage with OERs differently, and they get familiar with different resources and scholarly articles, et cetera. The second one focuses on content creation on the web, on how they can filter the wealth of resources that they can find on the internet. And of course, we start by defining what content creation is. The third one focuses on personal learning environments, how they can pick and choose and find their learning path. And they are told about the characteristics, et cetera. Unit four focuses on massive open online courses, which happens to be my field of research as well. So I'm really passionate about unit four. And we look at MOOCs in general and language MOOCs in particular. Here you have, for instance, recommendations about how to create a language MOOC that is successful. And then the last unit is the most practical one. They are shown how to develop their own materials and resources for open language learning. So this is just an example. They get a checklist when they are creating the resources. They are shown different tools and given guidelines so that they can create their own OERs. So the assessment, because it's a master's subject, we don't do exams, they have to complete a final task that has two parts to it. The first part is creating their own open educational resource for foreign language teaching and learning and they have to share it. And they are given different options to share it online. It has to focus on core language skills and the purpose of the task is to contribute to these new language pedagogies that are appropriate for digital environments. And that's the first part of the final task. The second part is a written document that supports the language OER that they have created. So throughout the course, they are given different reading materials and they have to show that they have assimilated that content and they have to show their theoretical background, the underpinning upon which they have created the digital material. So students will have to draw from all those readings and throughout the semester. They are given different ideas because the first question they ask is, what can I do? What type of OER are you expecting me to create? So we give them ideas, we give them examples. They can go to really simple OERs and they are shown the different repositories. So they can create a resource for all your comments. Or if they are interested in creating a small online course, a massive online course, a Nanomook, they are given the guidelines to do that. Or this is the most popular option because most of them are already practicing teachers. They are given the opportunity to create a module for their own classes at the Arctic unit that they can implement in their teaching practice. So the next slide shows some examples from previous years. The one with the yellow picture was a Nanomook that a student created. The one at the bottom was a very simple but effective OER. And the one on the right was a whole module that someone created. He was a teacher of Spanish as a foreign language and he created it as part of his online materials. And to finish my presentation, I would like to give you a flavor of what it is like to follow distance learning methodology. We have to be facilitators and guide our students through their autonomous learning. And the student profile is very different to the face-to-face classes. We have adults, but not like 18 year olds, but people in their 30s, 40s, even 50s who are able to organize their study and they have limited time because of the professional commitments. And that's why they have willingly chosen our university. They have opted for this self-regulated learning. So as I have mentioned previously, the majority are practicing foreign language teachers and we have a majority of women in our cohort. So the virtual course has plenty of online learning enablers. These icons represent the notice board or the forums or the tasks, the study guide, et cetera. So we start the course with hopefully a motivating introduction to the subject. We have at my university our own TV channel, Canal UNED, and we have even a studio to record our programs. And that's the beginning of the course. We have a glossary section where they can check the different terms that they may find difficult. And they are given lots of examples throughout the course so that we get some scaffolding of the theoretical content. And of course, they are referred all the time to the Corel website because you have plenty of materials there. We have interaction enhancers. For instance, this one is a slideshow that they have to go and watch about the benefits and challenges of using OERs. And then there's a little activity in which they have to reflect on what are the pros and cons of using OERs. There are plenty of images, tables, diagrams. I mean, everything that makes it easier to follow the online course. And also the format and the graphic design try to engage their attention. There's plenty of recommended bibliography that is marked with the green icon that you can see there. Learn more useful links and extra resources that they will use when they are drafting their final essay that supports the OER that they have to create in the final task. And of course, communication is essentially in an online environment. We have the notice board with different projects, initiatives and the online forums that we are constantly checking and monitoring. So this is just a brief case there, an introduction to our subject. I hope you found it useful. And I'm ready to answer any questions that you want to ask. Thank you. Great, thank you. It looks like you have five minutes left for questions. The first one is, how long is this course? How many weeks and how can we learn more? Yeah, it's 13 weeks of effective teaching. We call it a semester, but really the actual running of the course is 13 weeks. And from what I know, our semester doesn't really coincide with the one in the US because we had a partnership with the University of Hawaii. And that was problematic because of the time. So we wanted to exchange students. So it works really well with European universities. We have an agreement with the University of Ghent in Belgium and are open to more partnerships. But our second semester starts in February and ends at the end of May. So I think that's not exactly. It doesn't really coincide with your semesters in the US. If you want to learn more, you can email me. I'll be more than happy to help you and spread the word. Thank you. And yeah, also people are asking for the link. So I think there is a link to the course in the program. So I'm assuming that's the main. Yeah, I mean, if you are interested in the actual course content that I can email it to you because it's inside our LMS. So it's not freely available as such, but I have a Creative Commons license. So it was me that created the material. So I'm more than happy to share that with anyone that is interested in the course content. What exactly is a MOOC? Oh, oh, you wanna get me started. And right, you know about MOOCs, these massive open online courses. So a nano MOOC is a condensed version of it. So ideally, you can do a MOOC in a day or a couple of days. MOOC normally takes three weeks or so to complete. So it wouldn't be realistic to ask our master's students to create a whole MOOC. So we tell them, okay, if you are interested in that format, how about you create content and activities for a couple of days, basically. So that's a nano MOOC. And so those that are into, you know, non-formal education and exploring other formats, they do that. The one that I showed on the slide, she was a last year student, she did a phenomenal work with that. She really was into it. So yeah, the students surprised you. I'm really pleased because it's one of these things that it was in my head that people were asking me about OERs, open practice and say, well, let's offer a course. And you think that maybe no one is gonna sign up, but the people get more and more interested. And yeah, we're slowly spreading the word in Spain. An example of the content, it's always a foreign language. So it can be from professional. This one, the person that created the nano MOOC, it was English for tourism. So English, you know that in Spain, we get lots of tourists. So it was just basic hotel vocabulary and stuff like that. Thank you so much, Elena. That was really very interesting. And so yeah, I wanna invite you to come again next year and keep telling us about UNED. It's a, I didn't know about it, now I do. So thanks so much. Okay, my pleasure. You'll hear more from me.