 All right. Hello everybody. Hope you can hear us. Welcome to the second webinar in our June webinar series. I'm Darren Fonds, the project manager here at the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. And I'm Natalie Stanfield-Chilgray, Publications Manager of Quo. Thank you for joining us today for our webinar on the practice of adapting, teaching, and creating OER for use in language teaching. Right. We're just going to have audio today, so no video. We're happy to have you with us today. We have three stellar foreign language teachers here today with us who are going to share their experiences with teaching and creating OER. First, we have Amanda Delola, who uses Frances Interactif in her classroom. We also have Dr. Orlando Kellan with us, who's an adopter and creator of OER in Spanish and Portuguese. And we're also joined by Carl Blyth, the director of the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning. So we're really excited to have all of them here today. So we're unfortunately also to have, unfortunately, Stephanie here today, due to some technical issues, but she may be in the chat room with us today. But before we do that, we're going to take care of just a few logistics. Last week we heard from a number of you that you had audio issues. So to help alleviate this, we have been playing some CC-licensed music for all of you, courtesy of Genendo. The session will be recorded and made available on our website through this session. Yeah, and so just a quick few reminders. We encourage you to make this session interactive. So on the left or actually above, you'll see that there's a questions column. We encourage you to ask questions as the presentation goes along, and we'll do our best to monitor that questions pod and respond to your questions as they come in. So if you're going to be tweeting today, we ask that you're going to use the hashtag Coral. If you get kicked out for some reason, please log in under the same name as before so we can keep track of who's here. Finally, many of you who are joining us today have already indicated your desire to receive CME or CPE credits for participating in today's session. For those of you who haven't yet submitted the request for CPE credit, please follow the link in the info section that appears on the left-hand part of the screen and fill out this information. It is a Google form, so be aware that if your school blocks access to the site, you will have to fill it out later. You can also send a note to info.coral.utexas.edu. We will find you and make sure you get a certificate for attending. All right, so it doesn't look like there's any questions so far, but hopefully people's audio is figured out, so we'll get going with the presentation. Last week we spent a bit of time talking about the changing landscape of education and how open educational resources can play an important part of helping educators create organic teaching environments. We discussed finding authentic language OER by exploring some of the repositories and initiatives where these resources exist. We also discussed what it means to be open by talking about creative commons licenses and what it means to move from all rights reserved to the concept of some rights reserved. We finished by discussing the value of sharing, not only the resources that you create, but also by simply being a champion of open practices. Even if you just share links or get a conversation going around OER, you're spreading the word and advancing the movement. So as we get into today's session, we want to again sort of touch on that notion that education is changing. We're fortunate to live in a digitally rich landscape where there has never before been such an ability to access information and never before been so many ways to learn. There are opportunities for students that didn't exist five years ago, and as such, one thing we as educators know that to take advantage of these opportunities presented to our students, the way we teach and the way that we facilitate learning needs to be more responsive. So at its core, teaching is about the interconnection between ideas, people, and resources. And if you ask us here at Coral, we're pretty keen believers in the fact that open educational resources have the power to enhance learning. As a teacher, you have the unique ability to use a wide variety of resources to aid in the teaching of your students. Some of you must follow very specific curriculum. Others of you might have significant amount of flexibility to create or adopt activities and resources that work for you. But the point that we want to make is that when you use open resources, whether it be open source software, open textbooks, or other open resources, you're taking a significant step in opening up new possibilities for more effective teaching and deeper learning. You might ask why? Well, it's because what we know from talking about OER last week is that like any resource you might find to create, OER can be used as a standalone resource that you can incorporate into your curriculum without changing. There's not much difference between a non-open resource and an open resource in the way they look, pedagogically or even organizationally. But the major difference is that OERs encourage you to adapt them, to download them, to take them apart, to refashion them and do what you want with them. And why that's important is because as we think about encouraging more effective teaching and deeper learning, we need resources that we can adapt and change to meet the needs of our circumstances and our students' needs. So OER roots itself in that notion that learning happens best in a more organic environment, right? One, where students and learners have the opportunity to develop their own solutions by building personalized and contextualized curriculum and by providing multiple ways of mastering a skill or arriving at an outcome. As teachers and educators, I think one of the things that we know quite well is that there's a model of education that we're all too familiar with that doesn't really work that well anymore and perhaps a bit uncomfortable to talk about. But it's that linear notion of a factory-style approach to education of getting from point A to point B, right? We know that the world is a vastly different place than it was 20 years ago, let alone five years ago, with an entirely different series of challenges, job opportunities, and methods of innovation, simply expecting students to follow a regimented and standardized series of activities and expecting that that result will be a common point of success is somewhat archaic. If we live in such a drastically different world, shouldn't the ways that we teach accommodate that or fostering the multiple pathways that one can take to reach a goal and exploring basically customization and new explorations? It's important to reiterate just how much we're stressing the open component of this webinar series. There are many great free resources like course tools accessible online or made by someone and simply available for access. There are really some great examples of free materials out there. We saw somebody last week share a lot of them in our chat room. But one of the things that's most important to note is that free and open are really different. Free is convenient. Free might be a replacement for a costly textbook or prohibitively expensive software, but in the end free is just a low-cost consumption model. Open means something much deeper than that and deeper than no cost. It's something that's tied to the values of a free culture, which is to say that when you have the freedom to change something, or when you are encouraged to remix, reuse, revise and redistribute resources, that you're part of creating opportunities for yourselves and for others. So as we move into thinking about the topic of today's webinar, which is adapting, adapting, teaching with and sort of using OER in your context, and as we hear from Amanda Orlando and Carl, I want to step back and think about what OER offers directly to teachers. Here I think we would say that OER can offer a pretty great creative spark that generates alternative ideas on how to introduce subjects to students. And even if it's not the resource that you're going to use, it can be a great starting point. And so of the wide variety of OER that's available online, many OER, I guess, and this is our point, is to say that OER are easy to adapt and reuse. This means that it can save teachers valuable time. Open educational resources also have the potential to improve quality, raise an individual or an institution's profile, or even just transform the educational process itself. What we also know is that OER are an ever-growing part of this educational experience, and that in some ways it's an investment in the new educational paradigm. Years ago foundations got the ball rolling with seed funding, and since then there's been significant institutional and government funding to invest in OER creation and other initiatives. Publishers are also making transitions toward opening their content and where they have a model of sharing their resources and selling their services. So what we know is that we're a part of an environment where access to knowledge is becoming increasingly commonplace. We see content and services being given away all over the web, whether it's Google's various free tools, the hundreds of thousands of free apps in the App Store, services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr. Of course, there's also an increased access to online content that's both educational and not whether we see it with media sources, newspapers and journals and all sorts of other content. But the argument here is that while content is essential, it's not entirely where the value is. When MIT's open courseware program started, Chuck Vest, the then president of MIT, received a lot of questions about why MIT was giving away its content. He was always asked, wouldn't it dilute the MIT educational experiences or why would students want to come to the school that has all of its content online? I mean, why would parents want to pay tuition if the classes were free? And he always responded by quoting one of the faculty members who was a champion of the program by saying that the university education is not a box of books. His thoughts, like many of those of us who support the open content movement, is similar to that, which is give the books away, give the courses away, and give the content away. The value is calculated by what we do with the content. The value is calculated by putting those pieces together. You might say that the value of education, then, is in the network and the services that can be layered into the materials. It's in the engagement and the interactions and the information that sits behind and in between the resources. And so while it's true that a significant number of those connections are made on campuses and in workplaces, there's also a great amount of value obtained in enabling connections with others outside the traditional brick and mortar setting. So with that, if there's a message that we have just from this intro, it's to say, get in the game now. It's not a fad or a trend. Be a leader in changing this value system and challenge your colleagues to think about how you can incorporate OER into your teaching, how you can spend more time creating, drawing from, and contributing to this community. So before we talk about adapting resources, I want to see if we have any questions. Let's wait, maybe, the chat room. Let's just realize now that they can't ask questions. Oh, really? We didn't have any questions until now. Oh, okay. But let's give them maybe a few minutes. Well, maybe we'll go here and then we'll pause afterward. All right. So what I want to start with then in terms of talking about adapting resources is that there's a new wave of OER. It's high quality. It's relevant. It's contextualized and adapted by the people like you. Not so long ago, it used to be that you had to spend a lot of time searching in order to get good resources. But now there's a whole host of amazing resources available at a click away. As we discussed last week, there are so many packaged in complete OER, not just pieces of content like photos or text snippets, but full-fledged education materials ready for you to explore. And this includes books. This includes course materials. This includes workbooks, modules, exercises, lessons. We'll hear Orlando talk about some of this stuff that he has. We'll hear Carl talk about some of the resources that we create. But they're available through institutions. They're available through government sources. They're available through individuals sharing them on their own websites. You can find these resources just through common web searches. But new OER is going through this calculated phase of revision. It's staying up to date. More focus on authentic materials. There's an easier access for materials on a variety of devices and flexible to optimum formats. So basically the point is that the ability to pull apart and repurpose these materials is getting easier and more consistent. So the lesson here is that OER has evolved and it is evolving rapidly. It's fast-changing. It's ready for use and it's ready for you to adapt. So as you do find content, basically think how you contextualize this to your content. It's basically to your environment and apply the same standards that you have when you think of incorporating any other resources into your curriculum, which is to say start by evaluating it, right? Match it with your learner's needs. You want to align the content with your curriculum standards. Make sure it fits into what you're supposed to be teaching or that your district has sort of talked about teaching. Determine its ease of use and its accessibility. Work best in your context is a digital resource. Maybe it's better as a print resource. Are the formats open to changing? Can you download it? Again, these are all parts of what OER allow you to do. You want to look for licensed restrictions. For example, if you use a photo and something that you create, you want to make sure that you incorporate that, just like you decide to work. And most importantly, you want to assess the sort of reputation of the author and the people that are submitting these materials. Not everything's equal and sometimes this is not great. So definitely take a look at that. And so if you determine that a resource is good for you, you want to find an appropriate editing environment for that, right? Online, there's Google documents, editors, there's YouTube editors, there's Ted Ed, if you're working with video. There's sites like OER Pub that we talked about last week a bit. Connections, Open Tapestry, Language Box. All these places where you can pretty much drop your content, play with it, reorganize it, and then share it with the world. One thing you're also going to want to do is, of course, you're going to include, if you're creating content, think about the licenses that you're going to be using. Think about how you want others to use it. Visit creativecommons.org and find out what license makes sense for your use or for your desired use. And then most importantly, and some people sometimes stop here, is that you want to share that resource. There's no better way to improve the material than by sharing it. If there's one thing that we know quite well, it's that quality drives adoption of resources. And in sort of this model of sharing, the best way to drive the improvement of quality is by finding people to comment and change your resource with you, sort of the notion of the wisdom of the crowd. And again, as we talked about in the previous webinar, but also we'll talk about today, there are so many different places that you can eventually share these materials and then have that experience, whether it's language learning specific or even broader forums like, let's say, SlideShare. But some of these resources have the ability also to provide you with comments and people can rate your resource. But more importantly, you can just begin a conversation. So I want to also just sort of finish up here by talking about the fact that there are so many communities out there. We talked about this a bit last week, but growing communities of people who are engaged in talking about who we are. And some of these communities exist on Twitter, and Google+, but some of these colleagues also just exist on the hallway. So just talk with folks about what you're working on, what you want to work on, and make some of these connections and begin building something new. So now I'd like to switch gears to questions. We have two questions from the chat room. All right. One was what the structure of an OER is, or for creating an OER. And then the other one is what equipment they would need to create an OER. OK. So I mean, basic responses, and we'll hear probably more about this from talking with our guests. But there really is no rule. There's no one standard. There's no equipment that one needs. Really, the resource can be paper-based, and you could share it with colleagues in a physical environment. Or it can be digitally based, and you can upload it to the internet. But really, it can be anything from a picture that you take, a drawing that you make, a diagram that you have to anything as complex or as organized as a term paper or all the way to the lesson plan, PowerPoint presentation. But really, the only thing that's a requirement in this context is that that content that you create is openly licensed and shared. Otherwise, it would just be an educational resource. Can I jump in? Yeah. So hi, Olga. This is Carl Blyde. Let me respond to that by saying that, what Darren was saying, OER is this open category. It can be something really small like a lesson plan or something really big like something similar to the textbook. So it's a huge kind of heterogeneous category, and that's why it can take any kind of structure. But the main point, as Darren was saying, is it should be shareable. So you're creating something that is pedagogical value that you're going to share with other learners and other teachers. So we are here to, say, put an OER, a Creative Commons license, which enables sharing. Another thing that I think about when you think, thinking in terms of the structure of an OER, it's best if you can create it in some format that's editable. In other words, if you create it, if you have a PDF, it's not always easy for people to get in and change it. The whole point here is to be able to customize, take apart an OER, and then adapt it. So Google Doc, for example, is highly editable. That's one of the, I guess, main reactions I have to this idea of structuring your OER. Then the other part of your question was, what type of equipment does an institution need? Well, again, how do you write your lesson plans? A lesson plan, if you want to share your lesson plans for a particular thematic unit, what you can use just your own laptop computer and Microsoft Word, our PowerPoints can be OER, so it can be very powerful. So you don't need super fancy equipment. Just think about what you do right now. You probably produce a lot of content. Think about how you could share that content. And then Turin is asking, what suggestions we have for this first thing OER? When they use for it is predominantly a closed space, like a class, Wiki, or a blog. Sit a minute and file on that. What you interjected depends on if you're sharing something which is created as a group and belongs to a group, or if you're sharing the idea of what you want that group to do. What you're sharing as part of the OER is the idea of you can do this with your students, you can collaborate, you can use these materials. That's the open part. But then you can take that open part and put it within the context of your closed group. So it may be that the rights that you're sharing with the world is the starting point of the materials you have initially, but then when you put it into practice, you might have a management operating system which controls who actually sees that product. So there are kind of two different things. That's a great response for that. Let me also say the Turin's question about closed spaces. Most teachers create materials for their classroom. It could be like, again, a lesson plan or a quiz. So you have in mind typically a set of learners, but if you share it with the world, then you let other people decide how they want to use it because chances are that you're creating something that other people can use in a lot of different ways. But by opening it up, you let other people make that decision about how they want to take it apart and adapt it and run with it there. All right, so we're going to switch gears a little bit. We'll come back to the discussion. I think this is fantastic that we're starting here, but I do want to hear from Amanda who's going to sort of tell us a little bit about her experience using one of the flagship resources of Coral. It's called the Française Interactif, and I know that I'm probably not pronouncing it as well as native French speakers here, but just give me a moment as I begin to upload the presentation for you. So while he's feeling that, I will just kind of introduce Amanda, and she's giving her thoughts about Française Interactif. Amanda has taught, and she's a PhD candidate, a doctoral candidate in French linguistics, and has taught with our materials for a number of years. So I can give a perspective of a developer of materials, but she then can give a perspective of somebody who is forced to teach with it because she's got this, like a lot of graduate students in large programs, like the University of Texas, people don't always get to make the decisions about adopting the materials. But one of the things that she has done is, of course, since it's an open product, you can keep on playing with it and adapting it. And so, you know, we want her to also talk about what's good, what's bad about N-O-E-R. How does it compare to the commercial products? So, Amanda. Yeah, it'll pop up here shortly. Yes, all right, here we go. We've been controlled. Okay, so I'm going to start with Amanda. Okay, so I'm going to talk about the structure of the resource that we use here at the University of Texas, and it's called the Coliseum de Antilles, for the sake of giving this a bunch, not that bad. It's got two main components here. See, outlining yellow is the chapter in that. So it's sort of the contextual part of this resource. So it's got videos and internet activities and things like that, really seeing the language in action. It goes hand in hand with the part with outlining orange, which is the Texas bunch of grammar. It's sort of the decontextualized part. It's the grammatical explanation that has visited its own plot and treat characters, but it's sort of integrated seamlessly with the chapters in FI. So the features of... I'm just going to talk about the first part of the chapter in this. The features of FI, it's composed of 13 chapters, which... Slow down. All this says for you to slow down and speak more clearly. Oh. So it has 13 chapters that comprise it, and that is the basis for our lower division curriculum here at MIT. Included in that are several chapter PDFs. So Carl is saying that the PDF format tends to make it another layer in terms of editing. So it's something that... It's not beyond prepared. So you can change it, but it's a little harder than something like a digital doc. MBs tend to be... They make up the homework exercises in class exercises. Internet activities. Those are generally built off of online resources like the French train company at the website. We have students use planning and patience, et cetera. We really send them out onto the web to do activities that we created from other resources. In addition, we have chapterly interviews with two groups of people. There are second language learners that sort of mirror the students themselves. So they're students at the University of Texas, and they are themselves going to French in the context of this story. And then we also have native speakers that are all adults that they listen to. So they get exposure to both kinds of groups. Video activities generally involve asking these different groups of people questions, depending on the theme of the chapter, and seeing their responses. The students tend to identify with one of the other. One of the particular... One of the advantages of this OER is that they're phonetics lessons. It seems to be an up-and-coming thing in the second language. So this is nice because it allows us on a chapterly basis to address some point of the pronunciation of French and sort of pull it out on its own and spend time working on it. And so, cooperated with that is our exercises. And then there's fun stuff. There are song activities, cultural activities, et cetera. And then we noticed a question from B. Youssef who asked, are OER just digital resources? And I think what you're pointing out there is that they're not. French, the F5 is actually a book in its context that can be printed out, print on demand in color or black and white. But again, the OER does not have to be a digital resource. It's just one of the formats that it can take. That's true. So on the new slide that you see here, if you look at the bottom, this is the PDF for each chapter. And so the students have the option to print it out as the PDF form or to actually order a print copy. So they make this decision at the beginning of the semester. So more traditional learners will just order the book and I believe it costs like $20,000 or $30,000 at the moment. So they can have the book if they want it, but it's always accessible to them so if they want to script one. The PDFs are there. I'd like to jump in. I have the book and as a person who doesn't really speak French, I will go through those big lists of vocabulary. But since I don't speak French, I never know how to say them. And so I've got to go and listen to the web page. I actually listen to all the vocabulary so I can reinforce. Oh yeah, that's spelling. That's how I'm supposed to say that. It helps me a lot with that. So this is, I think, as we're going to talk to, I mean, this is one of the advantages of OER, right? You can piece together these different components. Those pronunciation guides or things like that may have, I mean, they were developed here, but I have another resource I want to show at the end, but this finish, gentlemen at Bowdoin University, has created this great resource that links to our resources. So it's a website or it's a print text and then he's linking out to these other pieces that are open and he couldn't do that if those resources. I do want to add something that's saved, again, to what use of his question about, is it only being digital? Most of the time it is digital. So like in this, right in French Interactive, we start with PDF, which is digital, but the point is that you can turn it into Trent. Because our surveys, and most of the surveys that I've read, it seems that people are still asking for Trent. Trent hasn't gone away. It's a very important role for Trent. But basically what we try to do is give them every format and let them make the choice. So students, if they want to download a PDF to their laptops, that's fine. If they want to order the print-on-demand textbook, that's fine with us. If they just want to, whatever they want to do. Yeah, we've all had the experience of, we prepare a course. There is a book that costs $120, and we only want to use one chapter out of that book. And we're faced with the decision, do we force our students to buy a $120 book? We're normally going to use a little tiny slice of it. This gives us the opportunity to just use the slice we want to use, and somebody else can use a different slice. That's pretty good flexibility that wasn't available before if you only have the option of buying the whole book. That's a very important point. So you don't adopt an OER. There's no adoption model. You don't have to adopt for its interactive. You just use materials. So use what you want. So Amanda, structure of a chapter. Yeah, so this is the available system, if you will, of each chapter. I've flagged or I've arrowed the main components of each chapter just to get an idea of how it's laid out. So the upper left, I'm going to start with the two little contents. The introduction, a little link underneath that. Excuse me, this is a webpage. This is what they see online. Yeah, so two slides back. If you follow the link, you can actually click along and see this yourself. Yeah, this is online. So this is what they see on the main website. So we start with an introduction video, and this is usually a thematic video. It tends to be partial in English, partial in French, and it just sort of gets the students on board for what they can expect in terms of context and vocabulary, et cetera. Underneath that you have the vocabulary list and that little symbol underneath the title, that little A, that's the PDF symbol. So anywhere you see that little A on this website, if you click on it, it corresponds to a PDF exercise that can be used straight away fast. So if anything is printed, it's ready to go, or if you want to alter it for your group, someone's just sharing it with you. Great, great. You can do it in there. Well, I want to talk a little bit about those little subheadings underneath that PDF symbol. This is what Orlando is talking about. So you see we've got sub themes underneath the list of vocabulary. And what this does is sort the vocabulary for the chapter by needing the fuel. So we have holidays, different expressions, customs, words, et cetera. And so this is where you click, and you can receive a little click beyond that, and it will actually pronounce the words for you. So it's not just a traditional vocabulary list where you have the foreign language version and then the transition into English. It's also a button where a native speaker is pronouncing it for you. So this is where students can go, not that they would do, but this is where students can go to hear the word pronounced by a native speaker and practice it over and over. Beneath that is the phonetics lesson. So these are the, there are usually oral exercises that go with it. There's some sort of linguistic white explanation that sort of draws students' attention to some phonetic aspect of the language. Underneath that you have the grammar. And if you recall on the main site, there were two columns that I played your attention to. This is the integration of the grammar. So you've got this whole structure going on in each chapter, but this is where they interact. So this is where you get the interaction of the story and the grammar. And so here you have grammar explanations with on either one of any of those numbers. You'll get an explanation. And then with it comes an exercise. And so we're going to look at that later. It's a self-grading exercise that the students do on their own time and then bring their impressions back to the top. On the right-hand side now we've got the videos. You'll see that there are different subheadings that we've got vocabulary and context. And this tends to be to follow the story line of the chapter. And so you see you've got the F activities, three different video activities. Beneath that you have the interviews. So these are the groups of characters that the students get to know. So you have the French speakers at the top and then the LTS and students at the bottom. So each person's name, their response to their response to a question that's on the left-hand side. Beneath that you have a culture activity and this generally sends the students to a French television channel station. And so there they have a little four or five minute clip that we've integrated for them and an activity that I'm thinking of. Beneath that is an internet activity. This is a green heart activity so they're actually sent to a French online green heart site and they bring their own activity. And beneath that the song. There's a song for every chapter and I believe they're filmed most of the time. Most of them are from two days south and some of them are just independent. We have another question in the chat room. Let's see. We didn't have somebody else answer it. Let's do that Karen. So the question was how this French text complies with the actual rules and asking if you speak 90% French in the class and does this serve as part of a flip classroom? Yes. And then Karen answered yes. So yeah, people have been talking about the flip classroom as though it's a recent invention. So French interactive, we've been flipping the classroom for 13 years so they go online. They do a lot of this homework that prepares them to do activities. All of the content that Amanda is just enumerated here and talked about. The last step then of course is you go back to the class and the activities are contained in the textbook. So essentially the kinds of materials that you're interacting with the media online is to prepare you for activities that take place in the classroom that are more communicative and more contextualized and require real human needs. I can give you an example from our end. One of our Portuguese language materials had a discussion blog that goes with them. When the students write their comments in that discussion blog as part of their assignments before class now what I do is they work on the assignment at home. They write their comments in the discussion blog. I get up at 6 o'clock in the morning review all the comments they've made in the blog and then I prepare lessons for the day in class. So where I used to be the one who prepared what I was going to do in class now I'm the one that looks at the student comments and based on that prepare my lesson plan for the day. You talked about flipping things. They are now the ones that are controlling what I'm going to do in class based on their discussion before. So it's totally changed the way I teach class. Real quickly I want to Olga raises a good question about are there similar websites in Russian? The answer is no. But we do have a lot of content in Russian so go to our website and you can select according to the languages. We have other kinds of content available but not exactly along the lines of French interactive. We do have two other sites that are similar. One is in Yoruba, the national language of Nigeria and the Dojin Glick, the German website. And also somebody raises a really good question about can you recommend platforms? For those not at depth at the age. So essentially remember this is just a website so there's nothing you can just click on these links. There's nothing for you to do. You simply access all the contents it's available. Well so his question also bases itself and is there a way to use those resources and assemble them using things other than building the website. And one of the things that we have available or at least we talked briefly about is the vast number of repository slash content editing websites that exist where you can upload your content, mix it around, mash it up. One of which has been around for about 10 years is called Connections. It's based at a Rice University in Houston, Texas. There's another one that's being funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation called OER Pub. For those of you interested in language learning specific resources and areas to do that, we talked about language box. That's one that's based out of Great Britain. So there's also OER Commons which is a resource that you can upload content, draw from others and mash it up. One out of Utah open tap history. So there's so many different places for you to go. Even in our location in our own Spanish and Portuguese materials in our case there's a link where for example if you've made a lesson plan that goes with any of the materials that we have we welcome you submitting that lesson plan to the websites and other people can see what you did with our materials and build on that for the future as well. That's an easy way to do it. Let's continue here from so we're going to I'm going to talk now about the Texas French grammar and this is the grammar interface that goes with the conceptualization. Basically it has its own plot line, it has its own cartoon characters they interact with one another and they have these sound clips that go with them. For each grammatical point there's an explanation there are several examples and then there's a texture size that goes with it which is a self-reading online activity. What we do here at UT is we have our students do these exercises and I see here there's a question about spelling and punctuation. Accents count, so they have to put it out of 10 out of 10 and then they copy paste their and send them to the lab work and that's how we know that they've done the activity. This is what a grammar point looks like the arrow up shows you an explanation this is an indication you've got a comment generally that a company sees the students tend to like this next to on the left-hand side you've got a horizontal arrow there's a little audio box if you click on that somebody reads to you the dialogue that's happening and then on the right-hand side you have a translation of that the texture size done that the students do to sort of synthesize the material it looks like this so generally they're translation exercises so you've got some sort of sentence here in French and then they've got to apply the grammar points of negation in this sense they type in the empty field Here's what they get when they click submit so they get corrected output the corrected answer and then they show them what your answer was one of the downsides to an activity like this is if the students will enter anything they want and then they'll just copy paste the correct answers the second time around so they found ways around this but if they don't abuse the system it's a good way for them to learn grammar on their own so at UT FI is 13 chapters now it's the lower division curriculum which is two intensive semesters every day for an hour, 15 minutes, or an hour and 15 minutes most of the grammar that is included in text Texas French grammar is covered in class time we tend to do the PDFs, the videos the activities together where there's a lot of interaction we're still using the community classroom and then homework they do a lot of their own exploration in terms of vocabulary, pronunciation watching the videos online the only main supplement that we're using now that's an OER with FI is the clear system that is through the Michigan State and what it is is basically a video interface that we use to dispense our oral exams which we do one for chapter and they tend to be three to five questions where we record ourselves as instructors asking these questions in a conversational style and then all of a sudden the students the cameras are throwing and the students have to record their own answers so I've pasted an image of what that looks like you see there's a little window they see our head talking and then all of a sudden the cameras on that they respond and so this is how we evaluate in a real time situation oral exam there's no information if you're interested in FI there's information on the main page the link that I provided earlier on and there are also lesson plans exams in the exam bank there are final exams you register under the teacher the local thing you register at the teacher and you can have a free account and there you can have access to Grant's lesson plans still by any sort of teaching materials this is also the place where you can send your own material if you wanted to cruising cons of FI tonight can you go back I just want to make one comment and it's kind of relates to some things that Orlando does too so even though a lot of these materials are kind of static we don't constantly change everything in the textbook we do have a pretty active group of people now who are using French interactive and they extend it in many different ways so this is an important point OERs are really during use of word organic they are grown from a community of users and that includes all these different teachers all over the world using this so lesson plans and still buying scripts that's all kept fresh and you learn from each other it's not just using a textbook it's joining a community my last point here just some pros and cons of FI it's cost free the one thing I like as an instructor you don't have that lag time you don't have the textbook the first day in you give the students the access information and they're on right away they can be on in class at first day so you can jump right in I think that's a huge benefit of it it's multifaceted there are tons of different activities with different kinds of learning styles the scope is really large so we're not limiting ourselves to just one textbook that's being more approach but we're using the internet that's meaningful for them it's also updated regularly in terms of there are references that sort of go out of date or errors in the activities it's something we get to check out you like cons that I have as an instructor that the characters that the students meet tend to be I would say culturally biased so we're non-traditional students they don't tend to identify a whole lot with it largely the second language speakers friends that they meet are undergraduates and they're usually in the fairing study abroad so I think what ends up happening is they feel a little less identified than they might with other characters but again being an LER this is something to fix by supplementing with outside material also culturally speaking the curriculum is really heavily focused on France so it doesn't mention things like Canada or Africa or other places in the world where French has spoken and so this I think is the wrong idea for people who are going to see the first exposure to French again this is something that you can supplement and a follow-up story on that I want to mention a French professor contacted me and she wanted to use French Interactive in Nigeria so she was teaching French in Nigeria and a couple weeks into the program she realized that this isn't working so well because the whole premise of French Interactive is understanding French culture and language through the subjectivity of American students and my students are Nigerian and I said well take it apart and try to update it by the Nigerian experience so she basically turned the course around and she took the premise, the idea and then flipped it into the Nigerian French Interactive which is exactly the whole point of LER I think you want to be careful about these are not materials you're supposed to use in a specific way we've just heard how Amanda uses them but it may very well be that you look at these materials you take a little piece of it and you say you know what that's going to fit into a current class that I already teach I can drop this part in right here that way and so you want to be a little cautious about saying what's the right way to use all this it really is as an open resource this is the beauty of it you get to take it and reshape it and it works for you I know this that Brian Mayberry asked about how do I do things by six o'clock in the morning well the point really is if there's a new way for you to interact with students and they can then write in certain blog comments and discussions comments before I get to class about those materials that gives me a new way to do things in my classroom in your case it may be different I know in ours I made the mistake students never know which day midnight is it's midnight Thursday or it's midnight already Friday so then I decided that's also wrong because students do all their homework after midnight and to make something do it midnight was their prime homework time so I learned I had to make it do three o'clock in the morning and then when I got up at six everything was waiting for me that's just it works for me it works for my situation but you may very well say oh I can take these materials have students do XYZ with it maybe totally unique so I want to ask a few questions about your experience creating OER when you started creating materials that you knew you were going to incorporate into your classroom or just teaching materials did you know that you were going to be creating these as OER or was it something you stumbled upon one day when you realized part of the world I live in both Spanish and Portuguese if you're doing Portuguese it's a less commonly taught language there are fewer materials available and traditional publishing companies are not as anxious to publish things in a less commonly taught language so I think a lot of what got me wrong is simply there were not materials available in the less commonly taught language publishers didn't want to go through the expense and the risk of publishing certain things so we had to find a new way to do it and everybody who's ever taught a less commonly taught language they go through the situation of talking to their peers talking to their colleagues and finding out what do you use for that class what do you do for this, what ideas do you have so really this is a logical extension of anybody who finds themselves teaching a less commonly taught language with a lack of materials starts trying to figure out how to get materials and already for 30 years we've been sharing materials back and forth that's not anything really new for a less commonly taught language so following up on that one thing I wanted to address too is that a lot of people begin creating materials sometimes run up against this question of why would you share that material with the world for free when you maybe could have approached a textbook company and made some money off of this, what drove you to simply this giving this content away, openly licensing it when for example the part of the materials that we created were created from a grant either from a university or from the government or some other source it gets kind of tricky when you say well I received money from X source to create these materials and now I'm the guy that's going to turn them into the book and I'm the guy that gets paid for it it almost seems wrong in some ways but if the community is what funded the creation of it then I feel pretty happy with the idea let's share those materials with that same community that actually did it so for example we have created the Coversa Vasilata it was with the US government grant that grant was tax money we paid for so I guess you should have access to the materials once they're created that's just my mindset on that can I say about that too I get that question a lot why share these materials why not go with the publishing company I think it comes down to something really fundamental that is the value system of education I've got nothing against capitalism but fundamentally to me education is about sharing knowledge and sharing your ideas we can publish a journal article we can expect to get paid for that so OER is an infrastructure for sharing scholarship and ideas and commercial publishing companies don't quite come at it that way so I think there is a nice you can build a research component into your materials so for me it makes sense I can reach a larger audience with an OER I can reach underserved populations with OER which is really important I don't know to me it just fits with my value system as an educator and like I mentioned before the whole we can always just use a part and that's always put us in a difficult situation of how much should we have our students spend to buy these materials when we don't want to use the whole thing by having it all as an OER I really am free to without any guilty feelings use a little slice of something as opposed to the whole package and I think also I mean I'm talking about the value system you know as we talk about the crisis in higher education or even in public schools where we don't have the money, the money is drying up OER there is a huge economic benefit to people who don't have the money to buy a $200 tech school now one thing I want to ask is you're all scholars you're researchers, you're teachers if you were going to be going to that traditional route of publishing content you'd be approaching a publisher who has resources to provide you feedback to give to you was there any hesitation as you're creating these materials about sharing them like you're going to be exposing too much of yourself or your raw ideas or that there's this sense of wow I don't have it's not together enough or do you see that in some ways an advantage or a drawback or where do you start with that we talk about flipping the classroom but you're also flipping research it which is it used to be you would produce something it then goes through a review process which then gets published for the world to see because those that reviewed it have said this is a high enough quality that now the world can see it so that's the old model produce it have it be reviewed and then have it be exposed to the world this is flipping it a little bit this is saying produce something get it out there for everybody's use and then the quality of it gets determined in some ways by how much it gets used and implemented and changed and manipulated by other people so instead of having it be the review process by people that say this is worthy of the world scene now you're kind of switching it around and saying go ahead and see it and then do whatever you want with it to put it into the context of for your own use so that's a very different that's a different thing in the academic environment where you're supposed to do things the old way, be reviewed before it's exposed to the world so we are doing a little bit different we're exposing it to the world and then let the world be the review of it as opposed to that academic hate-keeper before I totally agree with that so like Orlando is describing the notion of a peer review peer review in scholarship is a small group of people so open education says look there are other people who might want to review these materials they may not have titles after their names they may not be a PhD or so but there's something called a public review and that's also important so public review gives you important feedback right away and basically the idea is to open up the entire system to let more people in to participate at every level to create materials but also to review materials and that you mentioned the buzzword the wisdom of the crowd that's the whole notion of cookies and so you collaborate with a lot of people and I can give you lots of examples of scholars that say look open education is also about teaching and research kind of folding the two together because there are a lot of smart people out here in the world who should be contributing to education in a small group it really does cloud up and give us research and teach you but that to me is how it should be that the two should go hand in hand when you are creating pedagogical materials every single OER should have a research agenda that goes with it and that's not something that publishing companies are at this point willing really to subsidize we all have the exact same experience with our students that we'll be in a class situation we're teaching something and our student will do something creative or make a comment or ask a question that causes us to understand things that have been way as well we're doing the very same thing you've always done in a classroom situation but now the audience is just everybody so one thing I want to ask of Amanda is that you came upon at five as a part of what you were sort of supposed to be teaching was the fact that it was an OER something that struck you as a this is of lesser quality or what is this did you have any pre-judgment about what it was or did it change anything in your approach to teaching or your thoughts about what it meant to teach with that kind of resource now I didn't know any preconceived notions of teaching I thought it was wonderful but in traditional textbooks prior to this experience there was a lot of time that we spent trying to integrate it with technology and so most of our partners teachers would spend making activities to bridge the gap between the world our students exist in which is online actually and then this French textbook so for me it was great and also it really demands well as much preparation time if you wanted to take five minutes to create an activity that is something that you can use as a basis for yeah so Natalie did you have a question from the chat room and we only have a couple minutes left so well yes I mean there were several questions I can go over them well if there was one in particular so then there was a problem raised that a lot of teachers are facing about the access for their students this is something we can't solve but we're hoping that foundations and or Google will do their part to solve that problem teachers are really good at work around and figuring it out so there are a lot of teachers telling you they have these kinds of issues about access so there are some kids who don't have access so these are the kinds of things that should be brought back to the crowd because other people have been in your situation and other people have figured out what they want for that I've got to answer Laurel's comment though about how is FFI we've been talking about FI as an OER how is this an OER well okay Laurel you're right in that it's not easy to change a lot of this stuff but it is an OER and that it carries an open license and you want to these materials so that's one of the things like Amanda was just talking about you can spend time changing this you can use these as templates to create your own kinds of materials we have a lot of stories like that I can give you an example we created some materials a few years ago where later somebody in Hungary said may I make a Hungarian translation and we said no problem go make a Hungarian translation of it so that to me was a beautiful example of taking existing materials and had it had an old fashion copyright to it it would have been very difficult for that person to make that Hungarian translation of those materials yeah that's just to note that's the beauty of the Creative Commons license is that it clearly tells you that you have that right to make it a derivative work of it a translation and I encourage you to do it as simple as taking it to Quizlet and making Quizlet flashcards or anything else out of cavalry from the websites all right so I want to know that we're at four but I do want to just keep going for about five or ten more minutes if that's all right I think that there's a great discussion going on here that for those of you who can stick around it would be fantastic to have because there is a follow up question here but I used to get the question around conflict about revisions and translations in case the final decision but exactly it's the question of quality especially as in this context you translate a resource into a different language I mean have you Orlando found I mean I don't suppose you're hungry and you may but how would you feel or how do you feel about people taking that content and repurposing it may not matching up to what you initially had hoped that it would be either biologically or even grammatically I mean there was a time when a person created lesson plans to go with some of our online materials for Congress but as later I had never made lesson plans to go with those materials this person also made exercises to go with the materials that were part of our cycle I have never made exercises to go with those materials even some of the exercises were ones that I personally would never have done so I thought we don't think those are really good exercises but that's kind of not the point the point is the person that used our Congress of Brazil data materials had the right to go and change them and use them in a way that she felt comfortable and furthermore she is now sharing those with the rest of the world who can also build on that so if there are revisions and translations and those sort of things if they're not either the quality or the type or the focus that I want in some ways it's kind of not the point the point is that in an old format that person would not have been allowed to use those materials to change the way they want to and that now that person wants to change them in that certain way no problem, go ahead and do it it is more messy when we've used the word organic a lot of times today and that's because these are moving breathing moving things and they keep on changing on us but that's kind of the beauty of it I agree with what Orlando is saying I just want to give use of the example of Wikipedia so Orlando said it's messy across you've got to let go of control if it's going to be open there are going to be people who are going to see your materials and see all kinds of things in the materials that you hadn't imagined and that's the great advantage but then you've also got to allow people to make their own mistakes so Wikipedia you get to see all the messiness of drafts people will add in things that later get deleted but eventually I think it makes for a better product and it also gets you into a dialogue of other people so it is collaborative and collaboration is also a little messy so we talk a lot about how to deal with this issue of quality control we want people to kind of take apart our materials and run with them but at the same time we also want to maintain materials for the larger public who may not want to get in there and change them so this is a really interesting issue what do you do with quality and who decides and again since it's an open environment we're not the only person who gets to make those final decisions and one thing that's interesting to note is that FI itself has a significant social media presence so on Facebook I think we have some 14,000 different likes a variety of different active users and it's amazing to see how the conversation that's taking place on that Facebook page around FI has moved very differently from what it perhaps was intentionally or set up to be it's a place where people share jokes share materials, share links to different things and I think that's perhaps one of the things about it is that it does take its own form in that you create a new community or create a community that has value to people and you never know where it's going to go so like Carl saying letting go of that control can lead to some amazing opportunities so on that note one of the things I want to ask Amanda about too is as somebody who started using OER as a part of her teaching do you feel like this is something that you're going to be seeking out as you go forward and in your next steps I know that you're venturing into career territory is it something that you think you bring your teaching whether it's FI specifically or other resources or other OER in what ways would you change or what else would you bring to there what are your thoughts around that? Yeah absolutely, I'm not on class at FI like any system but I can imagine going back Yeah I would definitely I think it's got a solid basis in terms of grammar in terms of access to the living language within the context of people speaking it and also in redirecting people towards the internet where they can actually see it changing more in the time that we create I would supplement it probably most culturally based in the sense that I think that it could stand to have a larger scope in terms of where French is spoken by who and what are French speakers but I could absolutely see myself in the same picture I want to just add to that so Amanda to me represents something very important because when we first started this years ago I had a lot of graduate students who were saying I don't like this textbook and we adopted a textbook and we're always trying to fix a textbook and I finally decided let's just do our own and it's up to all of us to create something and then take ownership of it and so Amanda is right and there are things that could be improved on in F5 and you have the responsibility to improve it so go with it run with it one of the things that I really wanted was to get people over the sense of like everything's in the textbook the textbook should be templates you see and everybody adapts them so that's so I'm very glad to hear her say this that you know it kind of empowers people to see materials and say to themselves I can do it or I can even do it better so I think in part of our training here at UT at University of Texas we want to not just take a book off the shelf and say teach but like take a book off the shelf look how they did it and then do it better it's a great way to think about it so there any other we're going to end here shortly but are there any final thoughts from anyone here? I just like I buttoned else this comment this is the key if you want to change it go ahead and do it let's do it well we've heard a lot of great commentary I want to thank all of you guys for being here it's been great to hear your experiences in creating and sharing resources and from you and Amanda about your experiences in teaching with it and the excitement that comes I think from this reality that where OER is an opportunity sort of a starting point for many it's not meant to be as Orlando was talking about the answer it's part of of an answer let's say you can apply pieces of it to your practice and of course as the licenses allow for you to begin piecing those out in ways and making things on your own and then sharing them back I think the final point that I'm going to reiterate is that this community is getting so strong and becoming more popular and I think there's more people like you join it and share your experiences and have these conversations that we're only going to see these resources get better so with that I want to thank you for attending our second webinar series we're going to be having a third next week it's going to focus on a resource here at we've developed here at UT Coral Office called SpinTechs and we'll be joined by some folks who have hand in developing that resource look closely at how you might use that resource as well the session is actually in Spanish? SpinTechs is a really cool resource for it's a video archive of authentic Spanish so if you're a Spanish teacher you particularly want to tune in next time if you have any questions please send an email to info at Coral it's on the title slide infoatcoralidutexas.edu and you can always download the presentation in some of the resources