5 | About a year and a half ago I started working as the community moderator for the Heritage Spanish Community (https://heritagespanish.coerll.utexas.edu). This web-based community serves as a space for Spanish instructors to collaborate, share and communicate with others about the teaching and learning of Spanish as a heritage language. We encourage instructors at all levels to ask questions on our online forum, to help other instructors, and to share the materials they are working on. OER are an excellent way to share language-learning materials, since they can easily be adapted to the specific needs of each instructor’s particular student population. As community moderator, I add useful content to our website, create interesting questions for discussion, and encourage others to explore our website and share their work. I have also been able to share my own materials as OER, such as the Survey on language attitudes for heritage Spanish speakers (https://heritagespanish.coerll.utexas.edu/resources/activities/) and the syllabi for the heritage Spanish courses I teach. Also, I have attended several conferences to present some of our OER we have created, as well as to help promote the Heritage Spanish website and to encourage people to join the community and share their own resources. It is very rewarding to hear from people in other parts of the country who are using the resources we share on the heritage Spanish website, and to see people collaborate and share their own OER. I believe that if we all collaborate and share our resources openly, we will be much more successful in attaining both our personal and common goals as language instructors. |
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