The Institute of World Language (IWL) aims to promote and support Open Educational Resources for Language Learning (OERLL). Our main goals are reducing the cost of course materials, eliminating barriers to equitable access, maximizing student achievement, and learning outcomes, and addressing affordability, accessibility, and inclusion for all learners. The OERLL initiative emerges within the field of language learning as an opportunity to strengthen academic freedom, to decolonize the curriculum, and to offer inclusive and open pedagogy.

In partnership with the UVA Library and Learning Design and Technology, IWL has provided grants and support for faculty to adopt, adapt, or create open educational resources OERLL in a two-year cycle in 2022-2024. A faculty retreat was held on May 6 in 2022. Jenny Ceciliano, the Coordinator of First-year Spanish at Portland State University, was invited to give an introduction to OER, its general benefits and drawbacks, and its specific application to world language teaching at the university level. She also shared her own experiences in designing and implementing an OER textbook and curriculum for first-year Spanish at Portland State University. Addressing her challenges and successes, she pinpointed the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in relation to adult education, assessment, and second language acquisition as important pieces of the conversation. Faculty who are in the first stages of brainstorming ideas or have already had a few chapters written left the workshop with substantial takeaways to identify practical next steps for different types of projects.

World language faculty members constitute the largest proportion of the OER faculty group at UVA. Many presented their OER works on language teaching and learner at the OER symposium, sponsored by IWL and organized by the A&S Learning Design & Technology in February 2023. Congratulations to the following members who gave successful presentations.   

Miao-fen Tseng (Chinese), Spyros Simotas and Alexis Osipovs (French), Stella Mattioli (Italian), Anna Borovskaya-Ellis and Aaron Thompson (Slavic), Lilian Feitosa (Portuguese), Paula Sprague (Spanish), Esther Poveda (Spanish), Kate Neff (Spanish), Matthew Street (Spanish), Alicia López Operé (Spanish), Esperanza Górriz Jarque, David Flórez-Murillo and Germain Badang (Spanish).

In January 2023, Miao-fen Tseng has published her OERLL Pressbooks site for her technology-mediated task-based language course, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. See her work at the following links.  

Https://uva.theopenscholar.com/miao-fen-tseng

Https://pressbooks.library.virginia.edu/nehcourse

More OER faculty participants will complete their OERLL works in 2023-2024 and continue to discuss, brainstorm, and present outcomes in the following years.