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OER insights into a multilingual landscape - Media and Learning Conference
The document discusses the Langoer project, which aims to enhance the accessibility of Open Educational Resources (OER) for less used languages in Europe. It highlights the challenges of OER discoverability, copyright, and the need for training for educators in regional and minority languages. Upcoming activities include teacher training and a policy brief to promote sustainability and commitment to OER practices.
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OER insights into a multilingual landscape - Media and Learning Conference
- 1. OER: insights intoa multilingual landscape Marit Bijlsma and Valentina Garoia Media & Learning Conference November 21, Brussels, 2014 This project was financed with the support of the European Commission. This publication is the sole responsibility of the author and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.
- 2. Content of thepresentation - Introduction to the LangOER project - Overview of Repositories for Language Learning - Getting started - How CC savvy are you? - How to find OER? - Challenges to move forward - Questions and discusison
- 3. UNESCO’s Definition ofOER Definition of OER: -teaching, learning and research materials in the public domain OR released under an open license -no-cost access -possible to adapt and redistribute with no or limited restrictions UNESCO, 2012, Paris OER Declaration
- 4.
- 5. Scope of theLangOER project • Enhance the linguistic and cultural components of OER • Raise awareness of risk of exclusion of less used languages • Foster sustainability through OER reuse • Address needs of policy makers and educators: – Offer training to educators of less used languages, including regional and minority languages – International policy makers capacity building // Mainstream good practice at European policy making level
- 6. 1st Strand ofactivities • State-of-the art report of OER in less used languages √ – Covered 23 languages • 50 million people in Europe speak a regional or minority language (10% of the population) • Diverse national approaches to OER (initiatives, incentives..) • OER in less used languages: from languages with considerable OER to languages with few or no OER at all • Commonly less open to modification
- 7. Language learning repositories– A diverse picture POERUP: http://www.poerup.org.uk/oer/api/
- 8. Multilingual OER repositories Learning Resource Exchange http://lreforschools.eun.org
- 9. Multilingual OER repositories Lemill as an example “Web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources for school teachers” http://lemill.net/
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- 11. Getting Started…..Are youCC savy? Video: CC
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- 15. How to findfree images and other media on the web? Strategy 1: Use a dedicated CC search engine which filters the web content for licensed materials. The best example here is a Creative Commons search engine Strategy 2: Use advanced search preferences in the Google (or other) search engine. Strategy 3: Use one of the dedicated repositories of images or other media.
- 16. …but there aresome challenges • Searching, discoverability and sharing • Copyright and quality • Concepts of the culture of OEP and reflective practice is novel to some groups • Incentives for fully sustained development • For some teachers, resources are not be shared as they are ‘their stock-in-trade’
- 17. Forthcoming activities •Teacher training activities in GR, LV, LT, PL, SE, NO in Spring 2015 learn everything on: Licensing, how to find and use OER, how to create OER • Policy Brief (December 2014) • Final Conference (2016)
- 18. Staying in touch http://langoer.eun.org/ #langOER LangOER OER and languages OER and languages LangOER teachers’ group
- 19. Topics for Discussion - Is OER uptake a far-fetched idea or current practice? - How to ensure sustainability and OER commitment?
- 20.
- 21. State-of-the-art investigation results Less used languages with considerable OER resources
- 22. State-of-the-art investigation results Diversified picture Less used languages with considerable OER resources Active and vibrant; state-supported or grass-root initiatives
- 23. The benefits ofOER OER—as resources that lend themselves to collaboration, knowledge sharing about practices, adaptation and reuse—support conversations and practices that may not traditionally be available through professional development. (Petrides et al, 2010)
- 24.
- 25.
Editor's Notes
- #2 Introduction of the speakers
- #3 Less used languages face challenges. They face the risk of linguistic/cultural dependence in the fast evolving OER/OEP landscape which is currently dominated by English. Open Education Resources (OER) can be an important tool preserve and maintain a language function and visibility. As things stand today, certain languages are inadequately represented in the OER field. This is one of the main outcomes of a study carried out by LangOER project. In today’s session, we will provide you with some basic information on the LangOER project, and we will also give you more information on OER / OEP with a focus on language and the multilingual aspect, repositories and finally. The discussion hopefully will covers topics important for moving the field forward, such as policies, language barriers, multilingualism and the role of preparation of practitioners as well as practices.
- #4 OEP and OER in general: Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) are being so widely used and discussed now that it is important to know what they really mean. The most popular definition of OER is that by UNESCO (2002). It defines them as: The open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes (UNESCO, 2002, p. 24). This is the definition we also use in the LangOER project. Open resources are often collected in databases called repositories in which they are categorized, grouped by subject, level or format and easily searchable. Some repositories are user-created (users can submit their own content) whereas others offer only approved content.
- #5 The project is coordinated by the Fryske Akademy and the management is in hands of Web2Learn, Greece. The partners represent linguistic expertise in most of the project languages: Danish, Dutch, Flemish, French, Frisian, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Latgalian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian and Polish. Additional European languages: Catalan, English, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, Hungarian, Romanian and Welsh are also targeted and included to contribute to the understanding of the OER landscape, and to exemplify other approaches taken regarding less used languages and OER. All in all, the project could embrace 22 languages with this selection of partners.
- #6 Enhancing the linguistic and cultural components of OER, fostering sustainability through OER reuse, addressing the needs of policymakers and educators, and lastly raising awareness of a real risk of exclusion of less used languages from the OER landscape, are all within the scope of the LangOER project. At a later stage, the project will offer training to educators in less used languages (face-to-face and online) to embrace stakeholders of regional and minority languages in remote areas of Europe and to make it possible for them to gain knowledge and develop skills.
- #7 Main activities a. A study has been carried out (available at our website and also will be available in this session in copy). This study started with an in-depth investigation of OER in 17 less used languages, as stipulated in the project description. We have finally covered 23 languages b. Aim to reach out to more than 200 educators (including regional and minority language educators) c. Mainstream good practice at European policy making level d. Provide teacher training and identification of challenges for language learning
- #8 The overall picture emerging from national approaches to OER is characterised by diversity. The existence of OER in less used languages ranges from languages with considerable OER to languages with few or no OER at all. In the map on this slide which is made by the POERUP project, you see how many OER initiative’s there are in the field of OER, this overview gives an idea of how the trend of OER is developing. However, finding good quality OER is rather difficult. There are numerous repositories which have OER, and users can select those which best suit their needs. Offcourse, not all repositories are easily searchable and well organized. In one of our WPs “the whole landscape of available OER and repositories have been framed. Some example, which I will not elaborate any further on for know, but would like to inform you about are: Khan Academy – a huge collection of educational resources, including a personalized learning dashboard, practice problems, and video tutorials. The resources are available for free to anyone around the world. OER Commons - A repository of free-to-use teaching and learning content from around the world from K-12 to college course. Connexions - A place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute. Connexions provides the digital publishing platform for OpenStax College, a free and open library of college textbooks Language Box-
- #9 Another good example of a repository which is multilingual and has a significant number of language learning OERs available is: European Schoolnet – Learning Resources Exchange – This is a service that enables schools to find educational content from many different countries and providers.
- #10 There are also multilingual repositories with a high number of languages, for instance LeMill (with an alleged 87 languages).
- #11 LORO – Language Open Resources Online, is a multilingual repository by the department of languages of the open university in the UK.
- #12 We have showed you know an overview of repositories where you could find good OER for language learning. However, there is much more to know before getting started with OER. So therefore we would like to make the final part of the presentation more interactive and practical. First thing to know as well before starting is on Licensing. To refer again to OER definition of UNESCO, -teaching, learning and research materials in the public domain -released under an open license -no-cost access -possible to adapt and redistribute with no or limited restrictions Video: 1.08
- #13 Thus, CC offers a diverse set of license conditions – the freedoms and limitations. This allows the author to define rules on which he or she would like to share the creations with others. At the same time, users gain more rights to the use of his or her work. Quiz!
- #14 Imagine, you just took this beautyfull picture. but don't want anyone to change it. Which licence should you publish your photo with in this case? CC-BY-ND If you want to use it for commercial purposes, what licence should it have? CC-BY-ND license CC-BY license CC-BY-SA license
- #15 So, if you feel like it is too much work to go through all repositories, you could use a webpage which can help you find OER: http://open4us.org/find-oer/
- #16 Strategy 1: Creative Commons search engine offers convenient access to databases of services offering multimodal content. Strategy 2 – google: When searching for images, click Search Tools and choose the License tab. Then select the type of license you need and ... here you are. Strategy 3 - If you are a regular graphics or audio user, you can sign up and create an account.
- #17 As mentioned, the picture of OER and available repositories for languages is diverse. Many initiatives are popping up and more and more networks establish themselves. Yet, there are some challenges and concerns as well offcourse. Which we will briefly discuss now. The existence of OER in less used languages ranges from languages with considerable OER to languages with few or no OER at all. Sometimes, the impression is more one of occasional initiatives without incentives for fully sustained development. Even it is given the impression that some initiatives work quite well as it is also community driven. You need people to add and share resources to keep the platforms alive. Yet, there is also an important role offcourse for the repositories to have good working search engines, topics and information need to be easily searchable and sharing and reviewing should be facilitated. Using UNESCO’s definition of OER, the investigation revealed that what is referred to as OER is to a large extent made up of language learning resources in the domain of OER such as dictionaries, online books in digital libraries, repositories, online course material, audio and video material, publications about OER, and resources targeting practice of specific linguistic items in exercises. These types of OER embody most of the aspects required by the UNESCO definition. However, they are commonly less open to modification. So the general quiestion actually is, how to foster sustainability and uptake of OER? We will hope to discuss this with you in a bit, but first some details on how you can stay in touch with our project and activities if you want to learn more on this topic!
- #20 Is OER uptake a far-fetched idea or current practice? The field is very dynamic. There are Oer inititives with considerable OER, or initiatives with few OERs available. However, there are some very active communitives, also from bottum – up, which illustrate that OER uptake is not a far fetched idea. An example of OER uptake: Nordic OER ( see additional slide 23). Some communities are very active and vibrant. How to ensure sustainability and OER commitment?
- #24 So, now having given you a brief overview of where to find OERs and which platforms there exist, that already would be some homework for exploring for example which platform best suit your needs. But what would be so good about using OER? You have already seen that initiatives of OER are manifold .
- #26 According to this definition, OER imply materials that are open, free to modify and open licensed. In terms of concrete action and for the first steps in this study, we initially focused on OER as teaching and learning materials that reside in the public domain, released under Creative Commons or Public Domain license, with no costs attached, open to adaptation redistribution and with no or very limited restrictions on access. In order to develop an understanding of what items to look for concerning less used languages, one issue we addressed was how to distinguish OER from other open access materials. Despite concomitant concepts of openness (open data, open science, open governance, etc.), in this study we adopt an understanding of OER that emphasizes the open licensing component and the importance of making this aspect explicit.