U Tiedau

Discord and Consensus in the Low Countries, 1700-2000

All countries, regions and institutions are ultimately built on a degree of consensus, on a collective commitment to a concept, belief or value system. This consensus is continuously rephrased and reinvented through a narrative of cohesion and challenged by expressions of discontent and discord. The history of the Low Countries is characterised by both a striving for consensus and eruptions of discord, both internally and from external challenges. This interdisciplinary volume explores consensus and discord in a Low Countries context along broad cultural, linguistic and historical lines. Disciplines represented include early-modern and contemporary history; art history; film; literature; and translation scholars from both the Low Countries and beyond.

Open Educational Practices in a Lesser-Taught Language Community

This article investigates how Open Educational Resources (OER) and Practices (OEP) can support a ‘strategically important and vulnerable subject’ (SIVS) in the UK, in this case a less-widely taught modern foreign language, namely Dutch Studies. It details the experiences of VirtualDutch, an inter-institutional subject community involving all four Dutch departments or sections of Schools of Modern Languages in the UK, that aims to create and share Open Educational Resources and to develop and engage in web-supported forms of inter-institutional collaboration in teaching and learning. After an overview of the VirtualDutch experiences, in particular those in the pilot project in phase 1 of the Joint Information System Committee’s Open Educational Resources Programme (2009/10), the importance of forming communities of both practice and learning around OER for language teaching is highlighted, something particularly, but not exclusively, relevant for less-widely taught subjects like Dutch.