Alison Dickens

The Community Café: creating and sharing open educational resources with community-based language teachers

The Community Cafe project ran from 2010 – 2011 and was a collaboration between Southampton City Council and two universities in the UK. The project’s aim was to create, publish online and share a collection of open access digital resources for community-based language teachers in the Southampton area. The project addressed a particular problem: the scarcity of up-to-date, online resources for community languages. These languages are often learnt in informal situations, and teachers are often reliant on creating their own materials but have limited access to training. Engaging with open practice offers this group the potential benefits of improving their access to resources, enhancing digital literacy and practice, and gaining insights into alternative pedagogical approaches through using existing online repositories. The project used a mix of informal ‘cafe’ sessions and formal training to successfully engage the local community languages group in creating and sharing OERs. The group reported that there were real benefits to their pedagogical practice through working on the project and engaging with open practice: knowledge and skills gained continue to inform their teaching. The paper concludes that while community-based languages teachers are enthusiastic learners and benefits of open practice can be significant, they need encouragement, training and a neutral environment to engage fully with the open movement.

The Community Café: Open Practice with Community-based Language Teachers

This book is an edited collection of examples of good practice in using open education in the language classroom. The publication arose from the two-day conference “Learning through Sharing: Open Resources, Open Practices, Open Communication” organised jointly by the EUROCALL Teacher Education and Computer Mediated Communication Special Interest Groups at the University of Bologna (Italy) on 29-30 March 2012. The main objective of the book is to showcase the many ways in which practitioners in different settings are engaging with the concepts of open resources and practices, and to provide ideas for language teachers who might want to dip their toes into the Open Educational Resources/Open Educational Practices world, or experiment further.The last ten years have seen a considerable increase in the sharing of resources and practices in education, mainly based on the huge potential that online technologies and the internet have for making knowledge available openly (Pantò & Comas-Quinn, 2013). The shift now is from an interest in Open Educational Resources (OER), defined as “materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone” (Downes, 2011), to the realisation that openness itself, rather than the resources alone, can bring enormous benefits to the education community. Hence the focus on Open Educational Practices (OEP) defined as practices which “support the production, use and reuse of high quality OER through institutional policies, which promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as coproducers on their lifelong learning path” (ICDE, 2011).

10 years of the LLAS elearning symposium: case studies in good practice

The speed of technological advance in the mobile phone, netbook and tablet markets has meant that learners increasingly have access to digital devices capable of enhancing their learning experience. This case study reports on how language learners, taking Italian as an option on the Institution Wide Languages Programme (IWLP) at Coventry University, use their digital devices to support their language learning. Foreign language educators in higher education need to be aware of the degree to which learners utilise their digital devices and what they use them for. This knowledge will allow tutors to be able to offer help and support. Learners were observed using their devices in the classroom and were asked to complete a detailed questionnaire. More detailed data was then collected from a focus group of students reflecting on the numerous ways in which they used their phones to support their language learning. The case study found that the use of digital devices to support language learning was widespread and often took place outside the classroom. It also revealed that tutors were unable to recommend appropriate apps and that learners tended to use their devices autonomously and unintegrated with their modules. Learners expressed a desire for the integration of mobile language learning resources with their existing course books and on-line learning materials.