Abstract
An OER Kaleidoscope for Languages
Alannah Fitzgerald, Durham University and SCORE, The Open University, UK; Concordia University, Canada Anna Comas-Quinn, SCORE, The Open University, UK Antonio Martínez-Arboleda, Leeds University and SCORE The Open University, UK Ulrich Tiedau, University College London, UK
Moderator: Alannah Fitzgerald, Research Fellow at the English Language Centre at Durham University and a Teaching Fellow with the Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE) at the Open University, working in the area of Open Educational Resources for English for Academic Purposes in HE institutions, and with Non Governmental Organisations to devise educational interventions for under-resourced communities and currently developing the TOETOE project (Technology for Open English - Training with Open E-resources) to provide open e-resources for training language teachers and learners to utilise, develop and share learning content derived from a range of open resources.
Panel:
Anna Comas-Quinn, Lecturer in Spanish at the Open University, UK, and a Teaching Fellow at the Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE). Her research is in the area of computer-mediated communication and its potential to enhance language teaching and learning, and teacher education. Antonio Martínez-Arboleda, Principal Teaching Fellow at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Leeds. He currently teaches his specialist modules on Spanish Politics and Spanish in an Economic and Business Context, but has broad experience in developing and delivering language learning programmes in HE. Ulrich Tiedau, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Dutch and an Associate Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at University College London. He has been involved in three UKOER projects from 2009/10 onwards and has just been nominated as a Knowledge Transfer Champion with an action plan to promote and extend the OER provision across the modern language departments at UCL (2012). Conference Theme: Innovation
Summary: An overview of key and innovative Open Educational Resources projects for language learning and teaching
Abstract: Looking through the kaleidoscope, this panel will explore a wider lens of OER as they pertain to issues in language learning and teaching across different stakeholder groups and communities of practice. Panelists will present views from three SCORE fellowship projects along with further JISC/HEA-funded OER projects for languages. The Languages Open Resources Online (LORO) project, a multilingual repository of OER for language teachers, developed by the Department of Languages at the Open University, will be presented by Anna Comas-Quinn, who will discuss the perceived benefits of using LORO for students, teachers and institutions and the community of practice that this project affords. Current initiatives to promote open practices amongst language teachers will be discussed, and data on the impact of LORO on the professional practice of the 300+ language teachers at this institution will be examined. Alannah Fitzgerald will present a broadening stakeholder vision with the Technology for Open English – Training with Open E-resources (TOETOE) project for the uptake of OER including open corpora and open tools for use in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), involving formal face-to-face and distance education via informal communities of practice such as BALEAP (formerly a British organisation but now the global forum for EAP practitioners) as well as informal education initiatives such as the OER University. An exploration of the HumBox Repository, focusing on its openness, will be carried out by Antonio Martinez-Arboleda. The HumBox not only allows for engagement between practitioners in Languages, Arts and the Humanities, and employers around OERs, which is the focus of Antonio’s SCORE fellowship, but it also supports learners as creators of OERs for modern languages and cultures learning, an aspect covered by the OpenLIVES project in which Antonio is also involved as part of the JISC-funded eContent Capital programme. This will encompass a discussion on the sustainability of existing and future OER for languages, reinforcing existing communities of practice and encouraging high-quality open content publication for re-use. Ulrich Tiedau will present first results from ‘Open Educational Practice @ UCL’, a 2012 Knowledge Transfer action plan for embedding the processes of creation, release and curation of OER within the Arts and Humanities subjects of his institution, and investigate the various ways in which releasing language OER can lead to impact, especially in the modern language departments. Drawing on the experiences of the UKOER pilot-phase project OER Dutch, the successive phase 2 project OER Digital Humanities, and the experiences with a collaborative OER-based distance degree programme in Dutch Studies that is based on OER, he will highlight the importance of forming communities of both practice and learning around OER for language teaching, something especially pertinent in less-widely taught subjects like Dutch, and explore the possibility of cross-language OER development. Attendees at this presentation should therefore expect to come away with not only a more inclusive understanding of OER in language teaching and learning but a finely tuned understanding of their composite parts as they continue to shape-shift through complementary findings relevant to community building in both practice and learning.
