OER Master Creator - Badge application (Responses)


50	We created our own Spanish textbook in order to give our students a quality product at a much lower price (free for our own students). Given the very limited copyright-free resources out there, we decided to create our own textbook from scratch. Following ACTFL's 5 Cs (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons and Community), we used a communicative approach when writing our textbook to give our students as many opportunities as possible to use Spanish in real contexts. The writing of our book started with the layout of what we wanted to have in each unit. We chose vocabulary, grammar topics and cultural components that would align within a given thematic unit. At first, we divided the book into chapters that each co-author would write. However, this led to different voices and a lack of cohesiveness in the text. So, we decided to change our strategy and divided the work differently. Instead of each co-author writing a different unit, we divided the work into subsections so that the same co-author would have the same section to write for each unit. This would make the final product more consistent. We decided to give a strong emphasis to writing as a process, as opposed to an assignments students must do in the course. Our writing strategy starts at the very beginning, where students must start producing comprehensible output based on the content they just finished learning in a module. Through scaffolding, students make progress in their writing until they are able to put together a narrative that is communicative, coherent, and grammatically accurate. We also highlight the importance of learning the distinctive features of the culture(s) associated with the language they are learning. We have included two different culture-related sections in our textbook. One section is based on a cultural topic related to the module students have just completed, called Cultura, and another section is based on real narratives we collected from our own heritage speakers of Spanish in sections called Voces. We created Voces in order to showcase our heritage students' output and give our beginner students of Spanish the opportunity to read about real experiences related to Hispanic culture, written by their fellow students in other classes. Our partnership with Lumen Learning was vital for the implementation of our plan. Their expertise, commitment and technical support will provide ongoing and data-driven improvements to our book. We currently use a Waymaker version of our OER textbook, which allows students to get immediate feedback on interactive formative assessments as they are learning the material. Additionally, this version of the book can be embedded in our Learning Management System, so students have everything they need in the same space.

We created our own Spanish textbook in order to give our students a quality product at a much lower price (free for our own students). Given the very limited copyright-free resources out there, we decided to create our own textbook from scratch. Following ACTFL's 5 Cs (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons and Community), we used a communicative approach when writing our textbook to give our students as many opportunities as possible to use Spanish in real contexts. The writing of our book started with the layout of what we wanted to have in each unit. We chose vocabulary, grammar topics and cultural components that would align within a given thematic unit. At first, we divided the book into chapters that each co-author would write. However, this led to different voices and a lack of cohesiveness in the text. So, we decided to change our strategy and divided the work differently. Instead of each co-author writing a different unit, we divided the work into subsections so that the same co-author would have the same section to write for each unit. This would make the final product more consistent. We decided to give a strong emphasis to writing as a process, as opposed to an assignments students must do in the course. Our writing strategy starts at the very beginning, where students must start producing comprehensible output based on the content they just finished learning in a module. Through scaffolding, students make progress in their writing until they are able to put together a narrative that is communicative, coherent, and grammatically accurate. We also highlight the importance of learning the distinctive features of the culture(s) associated with the language they are learning. We have included two different culture-related sections in our textbook. One section is based on a cultural topic related to the module students have just completed, called Cultura, and another section is based on real narratives we collected from our own heritage speakers of Spanish in sections called Voces. We created Voces in order to showcase our heritage students' output and give our beginner students of Spanish the opportunity to read about real experiences related to Hispanic culture, written by their fellow students in other classes. Our partnership with Lumen Learning was vital for the implementation of our plan. Their expertise, commitment and technical support will provide ongoing and data-driven improvements to our book. We currently use a Waymaker version of our OER textbook, which allows students to get immediate feedback on interactive formative assessments as they are learning the material. Additionally, this version of the book can be embedded in our Learning Management System, so students have everything they need in the same space.