9 | I currently work as a World Language Instructor (Spanish) and a Virtual Learning Specialist with the World of Learning at IU8 in Pennsylvania. We have created and designed our own courses that we are creating into OERs. These OERs are then being shared in OERCommons to all instructors. Our IU also has worked on several projects, even collaborated and partnered with the Pennsylvania Department of Education, on a project titled CLX. These Classroom experiences are all created and shared as OERs to others. Myself and other colleagues at IU8 provide professional learning opportunities to school districts in our IU to share all the OER content we have built within our IU so they can access it, remix it, and use it! We share with them the process, our virtual learning design model, and our hub in OER Commons where we house these resources. I have had a proposal accepted to present at a conference in April to share this information in Pittsburgh. I also have another proposal pending to share this information in August at another conference in Harrisburg. Along with sharing this information within our IU, I serve as an administrative role in the World of Learning. We are a network of instructors that provide rural school districts the opportunity to provide their learners with languages that a school district typically can't offer due to funding or resources. We offer Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, French, and German. On a monthly basis we hold a virtual faculty meeting and on several occasions I have shared with them the COERLL resources so they can infuse them during their course development and instruction. I provide a lot of support during course development in which the teacher and myself access not only COERLL, but other OER resources to gather content, activities, videos, listening exercises, authentic resources, etc. One of the other things we offer is networking meetings monthly to offer opportunities of collaboration amongst the World of Learning Teachers and other language teachers in our area. We work collectively to locate OERs and share resources. Our goal at the World of Learning and IU8 is to provide every learner with a customized experience and it starts with offering and providing each learner with the education they want. I promote OERs amongst my faculty, the districts I work with, and instructors of all because this essentially provides the customized opportunity for the learner. They have access to new content and can be provided various options to meet a competency in that language. We are in the process of designing competency based courses all built out of OERs and this is a project we are very excited to work on and share. This will offer choice to the learner in which they can show mastery in a method that that suits them and allows them to make the choices. OERs is a big part of what I do- I promote it, I develop it, I research it, I use it. |
---|