29 | The central way I've done this is through presenting the OER that I helped to create at the recent Foreign Language OER Conference co-hosted by UT-Austin and KU. My presentation was called "Propias Palabras: An OER for Cultural Surveys of the Spanish-speaking World" and took place virtually on Saturday, March 6, 2021. There were a lot of folks in attendance, via Zoom - approximately 60-70 people, the benefit of a virtual conference, I suppose. I received good questions and even provided some additional materials to instructors that I met through the conference, sending the link to many and providing documents like the framework that I give to graduate writers on the project to guide their construction of a module. I look forward to continuing to work with these folks and to find other ways to promote OER, at conferences, through online networks, etc. I have also attended several workshops on this topic with KU libraries, most notably led by Josh Bolick, and have met with him one-on-one several times to talk through important elements of OERs, copyrights, and more. Finally, I have sought out and recommended OER resources to colleagues on a regular basis. Of course I have promoted the materials created for my own OER text, but also a number of other resources, for several different classes. Our university has recently adopted a system by which all courses with zero or low additional cost are marked as such in the course catalog when students are looking for next semester's classes. I believe that this practice will encourage instructors in my department and across campus to pursue free materials, such as OER texts, even more in the future. I don't really have more to say on this topic, but the I cannot submit the form until I reach 2500 characters, so here, for your viewing pleasure, is the abstract from my conference presentation on the OER that I created along with graduate writers: Palabras propias seeks to provide high-quality primary source documents to undergraduate cultural survey courses. The text is divided into modules that focus on primary texts from the Spanish-speaking world, each with an introduction that establishes historical, social, and cultural context as well as a range of activities that can be used both inside and outside of the classroom. Topics range from the Siete partidas of medieval Spain to indigenous film in Central America, from the writing of Columbus to the #NiUnaMenos movement. All modules seek to ask questions of who is represented in history and focus on critical themes like race, migration and the process of creating histories. The goal of the project is to allow instructors to adopt modules a la carte in designing survey courses to fit their particular curricular needs of their campus. By the time of the conference, we will have approximately fifteen modules published via Press Books. The idea of “completion” is complicated with this project as we hope to find additional collaborators to help expand the project. In addition to presenting our materials, I would be happy to discuss the process of creating these documents. As the original grant writer, it was important to me that we use this opportunity to help fund our graduate students, who have been the primary authors of this work. |
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