OER Master Creator - Badge application (Responses)


67	My language coordinator and I created these two OERs (for a first-year of Italian FL instruction) to tailor the educational resources to ours' and our students' needs, both educationally and financially. Before creating our OER we were struggling with expensive textbooks which were not addressing our needs. Before our OER we were not able to find an Italian OER textbooks of high quality. We started back in 2017 with a pdf manual, written completely by Lorraine Denman, with grammatical and cultural explanation, but without assessment, audio, video, and speaking activities integrated in it. Our institution was still employing Blackboard, which was not a very flexible platform for a OER. We were integrating our pdf manual with external activities and speaking assessment on Extempore. In 2020, during the pandemic, Lorraine Denman and I applied to a grant provided by our institution and we worked on the creation of our OER over that same summer. With the creation of the OER on Canvas we were able to integrate language, culture, authentic reading and viewing materials, and various different kinds of assessments (comprehension, writing, speaking, vocabulary, etc). Also, we were able to design the material for a flipped classroom, integrating reading material and comprehension quizzes. Using Canvas as a platform for our OERs allow the instructors to easily adapt the material virtually endlessly. Canvas it's an extremely flexible, very accessible and user-friendly platform, and so it's our OER. Anyone can download both our OERs (Italian 0101 https://lor.instructure.com/resources/dde3338e80cc4786bfce8b1261982d9a?shared and Italian 0102 https://lor.instructure.com/resources/8a4842c8d51647cf8533c5568526a70d?shared) from Canvas Commons, even if their institution does not provide a Canvas account. We were able to use our OERs in all of our Italian 0101 and 0102 classes starting in the Fall 2020, and they proved to be extremely efficient for remote teaching, providing textbook and assessments fully online on the same platform at no extra cost to our students. We also received very positive feedback from both our students and our Italian instructors colleagues. Our colleagues are happy with the structure, the material, the assessment and the flexibility of the OER. Our students praised the flipped approach, how approachable is the material proposed and how useful and low-stress are the comprehension activities related to the material. Dr. Denman and I are now in the process of applying to a new grant that would allow us to improve our existing OERs and start working on a new OER, for Italian 0103.

My language coordinator and I created these two OERs (for a first-year of Italian FL instruction) to tailor the educational resources to ours' and our students' needs, both educationally and financially. Before creating our OER we were struggling with expensive textbooks which were not addressing our needs. Before our OER we were not able to find an Italian OER textbooks of high quality. We started back in 2017 with a pdf manual, written completely by Lorraine Denman, with grammatical and cultural explanation, but without assessment, audio, video, and speaking activities integrated in it. Our institution was still employing Blackboard, which was not a very flexible platform for a OER. We were integrating our pdf manual with external activities and speaking assessment on Extempore.
In 2020, during the pandemic, Lorraine Denman and I applied to a grant provided by our institution and we worked on the creation of our OER over that same summer. With the creation of the OER on Canvas we were able to integrate language, culture, authentic reading and viewing materials, and various different kinds of assessments (comprehension, writing, speaking, vocabulary, etc). Also, we were able to design the material for a flipped classroom, integrating reading material and comprehension quizzes. Using Canvas as a platform for our OERs allow the instructors to easily adapt the material virtually endlessly. Canvas it's an extremely flexible, very accessible and user-friendly platform, and so it's our OER. Anyone can download both our OERs (Italian 0101 https://lor.instructure.com/resources/dde3338e80cc4786bfce8b1261982d9a?shared and Italian 0102 https://lor.instructure.com/resources/8a4842c8d51647cf8533c5568526a70d?shared) from Canvas Commons, even if their institution does not provide a Canvas account.
We were able to use our OERs in all of our Italian 0101 and 0102 classes starting in the Fall 2020, and they proved to be extremely efficient for remote teaching, providing textbook and assessments fully online on the same platform at no extra cost to our students. We also received very positive feedback from both our students and our Italian instructors colleagues. Our colleagues are happy with the structure, the material, the assessment and the flexibility of the OER. Our students praised the flipped approach, how approachable is the material proposed and how useful and low-stress are the comprehension activities related to the material.
Dr. Denman and I are now in the process of applying to a new grant that would allow us to improve our existing OERs and start working on a new OER, for Italian 0103.