By Lisken Dus

I’m old enough to remember using carbon paper and mimeograph machines to make copies of handouts for my students. In my many years teaching in middle and high schools, I eschewed textbooks, and when I began teaching at the college level, I continued this habit. Face-to-face time was at the center of my pedagogical process, with lots of active learning and lots of paper exchanging hands. Maybe the technology for making copies had changed, but I was still in a CC (as in, “carbon copies”) world.

Then two things happened that made this approach untenable. First, Covid hit and I no longer met my students physically. This made many of my standard homework activities, such as worksheets, etc., much more unwieldy. Second, the ratio of synchronous to asynchronous class time continued to drop. Mostly, I’m teaching beginning Spanish, and best practice here is really face-to-face contact five times a week. Instead, I now meet with my students just once a week. It was a big challenge to provide the necessary instruction without being present. I settled on a commercial textbook (available in both print and online) bundled with online interactive exercises, quizzes, videos, and other resources and assessments.

This worked pretty well – in fact, better than I anticipated, given my initial skepticism about textbooks. It was great to be able to track students’ progress on the publisher’s site and directly in Moodle, as well. But a couple of years ago, I was asked to teach a new course: still a beginning Spanish class, but with a different focus. The curriculum and vocabulary for “Introductory Spanish I” has some variation from institution to institution, but its scope is fairly well agreed upon, so texts are legion and similar. Now I was to teach “Spanish in the Workplace” – and when I went looking for comparable texts to the one I use in Spanish 101, I couldn’t find a thing. There were materials for “Spanish for the Medical Professions,” “Spanish for Business,” and a few such others, but nothing broad enough to cover the range of Spanish my students would need. Last semester, for example, I had students working in law, farming, nursing, administration, and real estate.

So I put together my own course, structuring it as a Moodle Book, writing my own core material for each module and integrating links to all kinds of resources, activities, and exercises online. I’ve taught the course twice now and have found my materials pretty successful. So I’m taking this opportunity to turn it into an OER text. I can’t be the only person out there in need of this curriculum.

I had a vague sense of what this might entail before embarking on the BCC OER Workshop, but the challenges are much clearer now! My biggest takeaway is really a mea culpa, realizing that although I am good about attribution and avoiding plagiarism, I’ve not been as conscientious with checking copyrights, licensing, etc., as I’ve cobbled together materials for my students. Indeed, before this workshop, I knew nothing about looking for or interpreting Creative Commons licenses or all the different ways “open resources” can be framed. I see a lot of link-checking in my future! And no doubt a certain number of elements will need switching out and replacing, if they’re either not open source or have incompatible licenses (a brand-new notion for me!).

One area I still have questions is regarding the format in which I ultimately share the text. Pressbooks seems like a good possibility, but the write-up seemed to indicate that this might not work so well with the large number of links out to other material that I have. So perhaps OER Commons would be better? Or maybe a BCC blog site would do the trick. I’m going to need some consulting help to decide what’s best here.

As for advice for others, I can only sing CTLI’s praises. The OER Workshop has curated so many great resources. By checking some of the many links provided, I have discovered many potentially useful materials. I didn’t know about Unsplash, for one, and it seems to have more images that fit my needs than, say, Pixabay, and is much easier to use than having to click all the right boxes on Google Images to limit results to Creative Commons licenses. Also, heed what they say about checking the resources often! It was astonishing to me how much more material is available now than even a year or so ago. Indeed, I discovered that there are now several OER Spanish 101 textbooks available that didn’t exist last time I looked. Once I take care of the 131 project, perhaps I’ll evaluate those and push that course into the no-cost column as well. I’m excited to take these steps into a new kind of CC world – that of Creative Commons.

 

Featured Image: Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

A CC Journey: From Carbon Copies to Creative Commons, by Lisken Dus © 2023 by Lisken Dus is licensed under CC BY 4.0