 Our next talk, Tutti Attabola, an OER elementary Italian textbook. Our two speakers are both from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, UMass Amherst, Stacey Jufre, and Melina Masterson. So the floor is yours. Thank you so much. We're so happy to be here. And it was so interesting to see Lorraine and Katta's presentation too, just to see how these different, how they're deployed differently and different platforms and everything. I think Stacey is going to show the book while I give a little introduction, then she's going to go through it. So we use the press books platform for our book. And this whole idea just in terms of how we came about it was Stacey had had a fellowship at UMass and Innovate Fellowship where she learned more about these resources and namely maybe it like Pitt does, like Lorraine said, UMass libraries does provide funding every year. There's a grant awarding every year for open educational resources, which we learned about. So we started the conversation, but we really thought do we have the time and energy and wherewithal to do this project which like the other course would cover two semesters or one intensive course. We know the mass market textbooks we've always used in the past and so we know what it take what we wanted to offer our students in doing this. So we went back and forth wondering if we could do it and then really for us it was COVID that encouraged us to do it. So we really got to a point where we're being isolated in our house is we sort of needed a project and we decided that whether we got funding or not we were going to do it because we just decided we wanted to offer this resource to our students we saw all these holes in the market and things that we wanted to offer that weren't there. And so we decided to do it. So once we made that decision, we just jumped in head first we started brainstorming structure and content and we based the structure on a lot of books that we've seen in the past so really communicative language textbooks that are to be used at home but also in the classroom. But I think when we really started that was our initial goal was okay we want to create a free and kind of customized resource for our students, but it really evolved from there. Because I think COVID in particular put such an emphasis on these issues of equity in terms of technology and access and representation. So when we started working our I think our main goal was to make it an economic choice and it really became so much more in terms of inclusion and diversity with what we decided to do. So the inclusive aspect of having a low cost option quickly manifested itself in our content and our themes. I mean, even we begin with the title which is to get down with everybody to the table but with the asterisk at the end to the we it's the gender neutral designation. Not all Italians love these there's also the at symbol there's the schwa I think there's a lot of debate about this but we sort of wanted to put forth this idea right away that we were that this was sort of the tenor of the book. And so then are we chose our readings our examples are visual images with the same kind of care and attention. And this collaboration was not just myself and Stacy which we, I mean we always say that this sort of saved us during coven we really had a focus and so much, you know, led that he also that came out of it. And because of the funding from the library we received in addition to grants from our union and the Center for teaching and learning at UMass, we were able to hire a graduate, a recent graduate to create the graphic design you'll see in the chapters. A graduate student to create ancillary materials so he wrote our workbook and lab manual, and then an undergraduate helped us put everything into our LMS of Blackboard afterwards which I'll show you at the end of the presentation. So it was really, really a team effort I think we're almost the most proud that we were able to sort of do that and all of this from a distance. So Stacy is now going to walk you through a sample chapter of the first of two volumes so this is the two volume book and she's going to show you the first. Thank you Melina. So as you can see right here to Tia Tamela volume one. The second volume is laid out in a very similar way we have our introduction a dedication to the future language learners and hopefully you can't hear my future language learner in the background. But he is there. So each volume has six chapters, a glossary and then some extra resources at the end for difficult topics as you might see in a mass media textbook. So the layout for each chapter is pretty much the same. We, we start with a sub theme and this chapter is just gravy ammo to tea. And then we set out the objectives for the students to be really clear about what we're wanting them to get out of this chapter. I think that it would be fun and linguistically valuable to start each chapter with a song, and they're all relatively, at least relatively contemporary and one thing that I thought was great about this project is it pushed me to update the part of songs that I use we went and looked for some recent ones that would work with each theme and each song is either linked to the content through either the vocabulary or the grammar or as in this case both. So after the song comes the book, the vocabulary section. And here you can see one of the amazing images that our graphic designer made for us here to help teach adjectives. And I think you might notice if you take a look that the people represented are more diverse than what you might see in a typical mass market textbook. It's really important to us. As you can see here, press books allowed us to gloss things right in the text as well as having a vocabulary section at the end of each chapter. So we tried to do everything in context because we have a character, my Tina here who shows who her faces help describe the help with the adjectives. One of the reasons why we chose this chapter specifically is it gives a good example of what we were trying to do with nationalities. We tried to choose at least one nationality from every region. Instead, instead of being more European and North American focused as some of the textbooks are. And then we also have these cultural notes. Here we have one that talks about the Italian history of colonization. After the vocabulary, we have a grammar section. And the way we've laid out these grammar sections is so this course will work in a full fully remote setting as we are now, none of our language classes are in person. And also in the classroom so it goes from being alone doing access having exercises that you can do by yourself to being more collaborative at the end. So a lot of our units also have these study tips to help students memorize the more difficult top topics. And after the grammar for each unit, we also have a video. And these videos are all contemporary. And a lot of them are loosely linked with a region and this one is Lombardia. So after the videos, we have a cultural point, and we went back and forth a lot about whether these should be in English, or in Italian and we decided that the topics were important enough that they really should be in English. So that the students could really dig in and give their opinions about how these topics related to what's happening in the United States. And so they could really think about their own conceptions and their own identity. So for the first volume we don't have readings in Italian, but we do have them for the second volume so that so that so that they do get that linguistic practice. So at the end we have the review of the chapter and they have a list of all the things that they should have learned studying. And then we have these short multi media quizzes so that they can test themselves before they move into the learning management system which Malina will show you in a moment and that's blackboard. Thanks. We saw that that vision at the end of the other the graphic that we had so like I mentioned before this was such a collaboration with a bunch of different people and so one of those things was the workbook one of the things that we ran into that we had to shoot in our first semester is because we did this so quickly over the summer is that we had this sort of PDF form of a workbook which as any of you know if you've transitioned to teach having an online workbook nobody wants to go back from that. So we were able to transition this over the winter break on to blackboard which is one of the elements is that you mass offers but usually we use moodle what we chose blackboard because it's the platform that our university calls uses so it's also for summer courses and winter courses so we thought this would be good for courses that can go all year round. Much like we saw in the first one we divided it into weeks and we tried to see I really felt it important if we were going to replace our book that offered so many things we wanted to be able to offer similar supports to our students to outside of the So this is just the development show you don't see a lot of information here but everything is divided into weeks they have easy access to every chapter of the book and then we've created grammar tutorials for a lot of the different points that they've studied so these are narrated PowerPoints that we created that have a short little quiz at the end so students can check their work. And then this is how we resolved the question also of the workbook that in the first semester had been in PDF form. We were able to hire an undergraduate student to do this work for us and the graduate student. And so now these activities are all auto graded. They look at like they're in the quiz function function that they can go in and they can fill stuff in and so with the exception of a few record voice recordings and essays. We've sort of tried to mimic as much as possible the platform that we currently we previously used that you mass. And so now between the press book and the blackboard do these are the two hubs of the course, which for us is good because we also have a lot of different people who teach the levels of elementary one and two like I'm sure many many many schools do we have graduate students and so having as many courses as possible to have all this information already there really helps us. And so finally we just have we have a few goals I think to finish up this project because we still look at it like it's a little bit in beta form. One thing is that we would like just like we said Lorraine and cat I have the recordings of the vocabulary. Stacy showed you we have a lot of these presentations or dialogues and things like that at the beginning of the chapter and we'd love to have those recorded so students could also listen to them. We think that's a pretty easy thing that we can do horse hopefully over the summer. And like obviously the workbook and lab right now are you mass specific right the book can be available to everyone shortly hopefully by the fall. But right now the workbook and lab are specific to us because they're on our blackboard so our goal is to create an outside hub that also houses the answer materials from the book so those would be available for anyone to. And finally we also our book needs to be unpassive protected right now it's still in its beta form and so we're still working on those things, and hopefully by the fall that it will be available to everyone. No, I think that's it unless you have anything to add Stacy. No, I think you covered it at all. Thank you we have about three minutes left for questions. Yeah, I said you get permission do we have to get permission. We were according to our libraries. Videos from YouTube, we're fine and then clips of a certain amount of time that they cut for us were fine in terms of permission. And the video for java not he is not the official video either it's a YouTube video so I think we are YouTube was fine for press books. And I think maybe we should mention as well that all the links we use have been saved in perma CC, and the library has backed up. Most, some of at this point but we'll be backing up all of our YouTube videos to a library page to explain that right. Any other questions. Someone asked about what kind of copyright licensing will you be adopting once you do share those some of the resources. I think we are debating. Definitely it will be creative commons with allowing derivatives and I think we just we changed our mind and decided against the share alike part of that. But we, we haven't finalized it yet. We're still using this for the first time, we're taking advantage of some of the amazing undergraduate students that we have who are finding small things that need to be changed so over the summer will probably put it into its final form and then open it up to everyone. It's like there's a lot of people who are interested in seeing these and keeping in touch and perhaps adopting them. I did put the links in and also the passwords at the beginning of the presentation so they should be in there. Okay, well I want to thank you both. It was really an interesting presentation.