UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN A DISTANCIA FACULTAD DE

FILOLOGÍA
MÁSTER UNIVERSITARIO EN TECNOLOGÍAS DE LA INFORMACIÓN Y LA
COMUNICACIÓN EN LA ENSEÑANZA Y TRATAMIENTO DE LENGUAS
DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍAS EXTRANJERAS Y SUS LINGÜÍSTICAS
OPEN LANGUAGE LEARNING

LEONARDO ESTRADA SERNA

EXPLORE ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRIES

https://leonardoestrada.weebly.com

AN OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE

Prof. Dr. ELENA MARTÍN MONJE

MEDELLÍN
ACADEMIC COURSE 2020-2021
CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 3

2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ................................................................... 5

3. METHODOLOGICAL DECISIONS ............................................................... 11

4. DESIGN OF THE OER .................................................................................... 13

5. CONCLUSIONS .............................................................................................. 17

6. REFERENCES ................................................................................................. 18

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1. INTRODUCTION

The study of languages through Information and Communication Technologies is

becoming increasingly popular in language instruction nowadays. This is due to the world is

interconnected as never before in the history of mankind. This has created new needs in the

characteristics of education of the century with digital citizens who wish to access

information as quick and easy as sending a Whatsapp message.

New theories of language learning have emerged lately in order to take advantage of

the affordances that ICTs represent. Although it is common to pay for many high quality

Internet resources to learn a language, proposals such as openness in Web repositories for

teaching and learning are every time having more favorable reception among cyber users,

and these are called OERs (Open Educational Resources). Being able to acquire a language

anywhere, anytime, through varied interactive tools for free is a very attractive offer which

has the capacity to carry educational elements to the most needy students who cannot afford

an expensive language course.

On the other hand, these digital artifacts come as an extra experience for presence

classes so that students have more chances to constantly be practicing the language even at

home with eye-catching online interfaces only using their cell phones, tablets or laptops. This

is what has been referred to as Blended Learning, a very applied model for language teaching

that appends the best of Internet and presence tools for learning (Watson et al, 2008). As a

matter of fact, with the current situation of the pandemic for the Covid-19, many schools and

language institutes have been obliged to turn to multimedia materials and Apps as an

effective alternative to make up for regular classes.

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 The present document analyzes theory behind an online OER that contributes to foster

the English language communication and cultural awareness with a Creative Commons

License, which allows the audience to utilize and even adjust the contents as required, with

no limitations for copying or distributing the materials. This online course is also centered

on autonomous learning by means of communicative tasks that can be achieved on an

individual basis. Besides, its content is focused on sociolinguistic and pragmatic elements

that aids in the exploration of the English language cultures, and this helps build some

mindfulness on the importance of developing the intercultural competence while learning a

foreign or second language, a process that should always go together.

This paper will revise some of the research that supports the use of open online

resources and hybrid classes, and the pedagogy behind the decisions made when creating and

applying the course instruments. It will examine some studies on how OERs may promote

second or foreign language acquisition, as well as autonomy for learning, and why it is

important to elaborate an intercultural understanding in today’s bilinguals. The following

chapter will expose first some of the theoretical background on OERs for language teaching.

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2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Open Educational Resources (OER) are Internet materials to be used for educational

purposes for free by any person. They are learning instruments that are thought to be

unrestricted to author rights, and easy to share, copy or even modify according to individual

needs. This type of no restrictions license is called Creative Commons (CC License), as

Kurek & Skowron (2014) expound, and they also refer to a new license in which the content

is of public domain called Creative Commons Zero, where anybody can share and modify it

as it is unprotected by copyright, and this can be seen at a great number of Web pages of any

subject, so OER aims to compile resources on the category of teaching and learning. This is

a very humble intention inasmuch as many students with economic difficulties may have the

possibility of studying through materials at no costs.

OERs have become recently very popular in language education as many cyber users

are willing to learn a new language by means of the Internet, which they have at hand all the

time. With all the available information online and with the creation of new Web pages and

Apps every day, OERs have represented a social innovation and contribution to access

education, changing the relationships between teachers and learners, and making students the

center of the learning process. That is why OERs have a lot to do with autonomy since

students’ compromise, discipline and motivation to learn are key features of their success.

“An OER can be a course, unit, lesson, image, webpage, exercise or multimedia clip,

but it must have a specified pedagogical purpose/context” (McGreal, 2014: 51). There could

be thousands of OERs on the Web, such as Wikipedia, but none of them can be classified as

OERs until there is an educational intention on them. Wikipedia is a free resource, with a CC

license, open to share, edit, reuse or adapt, but is not a course or unit itself. It might be,

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however, a part of the materials integrated in an OER. Therefore, OERs are not just “stuff”

we see online; they have to be purposely created with the intention of teaching.

The formats in which OERs can be seen are MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses),

for instance, or eBooks, platforms, e-portfolios, PLEs (Personal Learning Environments),

Web spaces, social networks, NOOCs (Nano Online Open Courses), forums, among others,

as long as they have been developed for educational reasons and have digital, open and free

resources. This permits their long-lasting life for their adaptation and upgrade features. This

lifecycle allows them to cross over countries and frontiers, social stratums and even language

barriers, something sometimes impossible for face-to-face education.

Nevertheless, according to one study carried out in British Higher education, some

students feel alone with this type of online courses, and they express how much they need

human interaction and physical contact (OECD, 2015). There are high expectations on how

these online modalities will change the future of classes, although there are some barriers

like the loneliness issues already mentioned in the study, but there are pedagogical

assumptions that the more interesting the content is, the less students will need a real contact

with their teacher or peers. Also, there are postulations that it is more efficient when the

curriculum puts into a balance both the online content with the traditional in-class instruction

(OECD, 2015). It all depends entirely on the students’ capacity to adapt, their discipline and

willingness to study, and their personal learning style.

There are also misconceptions about the low quality of free and open resources;

however, in this digital era huge amounts of new online contents are being created, so every

time it is easier to resort to a numerous quantity of high quality information, images, videos,

games, slides, links, and so on. The creator’s duty is, then, to look for all of these valuable

6
items and compile them in a more formal interface, organizing and making it visually

attractive for a massive possible audience. This meticulous searching, selection and sharing

of materials is usually referred to as curation. There are tools such as Google itself for looking

up at items with a CC license, so the curation of images and videos becomes uncomplicated,

although there are some other means like Flickr with a giant repository of images and

elements perfect for creating OERs.

AREA is a social curation platform analyzed by Caeiro-Rodríguez et al. (2013), who

point out how the repositories in it maintain a coherence with the topic of search in proportion

to the learning aims. This platform also helps in the sequence, the choosing of activities, and

the design of learning environments according to what is intended to happen in a lesson. In

conclusion, they assure how the curation of Web resources empowers teachers as

protagonists of learning when addressing resources towards students’ needs, and it

encourages new ideas, creativity, and dynamism in the online courses.

Indeed, an appropriate design of e-courses might grant less difficulties for those

learners from disadvantaged groups, whose autonomy and personal study skills may not be

optimal in many cases (OECD, 2015). A Website that is not visually friendly, well arranged

or that does not make the interaction with the cyber user intuitive, is more likely to be turned

down, and students are more prone to lose their interest or feel frustration. In the case of the

eBook that this paper analyzes, it was processed through a page builder called Weebly, which

has a very appealing look in general, most of its features are for free, images intertwine very

gently with texts and links, all of the items can be adjusted, and all kinds of resources can be

added as well. Some of the curation tools used were Flickr, Wikipedia, and Google.

7
 Testing the efficacy of OERs, Weller et al. (2015) conducted a project among

thousands of students in formal and informal settings such as colleges, schools, and common

Internet surfers, and through interviews and quantitative data, they could confirm some of

their hypothesis in relation to the performance and openness of online courses. In terms of

students’ performance and level of satisfaction, they found out that there was more

engagement on learners, and their confidence improved. Actually, there were students who

admitted to have perfected their performance on the subjects after having taken the OER.

Openness was proved to be a matter of uncertainty by some of the professors as they did not

know if they were allowed to change things in the materials. Nonetheless, students perceived

these permissions as opportunities for experimentation and innovation, so openness fostered

new ideas and creativity on them when reusing or readjusting the contents.

The eBook presented here “Explore English Speaking Countries” was intended to be

utilized by anyone who desired to go beyond the grammar-centered language class to a more

appealing way of virtually “traveling” to the countries that speak the target language. The

page was designed with a variety of elements and tasks in order to make learning more

interesting and open to all. In this form, students are able to get to practice the language

through cultural content that will enrich their intercultural awareness, and this might enhance

their personal values such as respect and tolerance for others, and love towards diversity.

Interculturality is built through the interaction that individuals from different societies

make in an exchange of ideas and behaviors that contribute to a conscious perception in each

person. Rodrigo (2000) states that without communication there is no culture, and without

culture there is no communication, since it is through the interaction between individuals that

culture manifests itself, so this eBook aimed to approach learners as much as possible to

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English cultures via lessons of typical sports, food, native speakers’ behaviors and most

common expressions, their nature, architecture, and real greetings. This was to show them

the real scenario in which this international language takes place, and implicitly increase their

linguistic competence as well. It is necessary for cultures to put aside prejudices and

stereotypes, as ethnocentrism can be tempting and quite pervasive. This author also

emphasizes on how the awareness of the multiculturally of current societies may encourage

the minimization of thoughts of superiority or inferiority from some of them.

Hence, the intercultural competence is as important as the linguistic, sociolinguistic

and pragmatic skills, if the curriculum is looking forward to language integrated learning,

and OERs enable to take all of this foreign world to the learners’ lives. Talking about

authentic environments, there was a study conducted for students of Italian, showing them

virtual reality videos and images, so that they could explore more about the culture and

language of this country (Berti, 2019). The author had to record the videos with a 360-degree

camera, and it implied that he had to fly to Italy to collect the material, and the videos were

uploaded later in Youtube; other videos in Youtube with a stardard license were also utilized,

though. The channel is called Italian Open Education, and is openly available to everyone.

In summary, this study demonstrated how inclusive OERs can be, due to all of the

information of the 360-degree videos were visible for students who could not afford traveling

to Italy, plus students reported how well they felt with the activities, and how close they

sensed the target language; they turned out to be more interested in exploring the language

and its culture. Within the eBook “Explore English Speaking Countries”, authenticity in the

material was a priority following the advices by Harmer (2007) who evidence that authentic

materials impact on learners’ level of comprehension of the target language and its social

9
dimension. He explains that at the end of the day students will have to come into a contact

with the real language in written or oral speech, so it is better to make authentic materials the

focus of practice throughout the lessons.

This is not an easy task at all because a lot of curation is needed to filter the thousands

of resources with the learning objectives and outcomes. Additionally, this eBook took a long

process of edition, research, adaptation, classification, exploration, and even creation of

suitable contents for the teaching of the anglophone cultures. Fortunately, this is the most

popular language in the world, hence the data was not a few. There was a combination of

standard licenses resources along with Creative Commons ones, evidently adding the

respective citations for all of them, but there is still a need for more online tools of public

domain due to depending on the nature of the course it might not be possible to find the

desired materials.

In spite of this, with the 9 lesson in the eBook, students may find entertaining to

explore the cultures behind the English language, with most of the resources freely available

and adaptable to their necessities. Clearly, OER courses have the attribute of the constant

development and improvement, and this eBook is no exception. The next section will go over

the methodological decisions arrayed throughout the lessons of this OER.

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3. METHODOLOGICAL DECISIONS

- Target group for the OER: This eBook has been created not thinking about a

specific age, nationality, gender or background of students, as it was thought to

be used freely by anyone at any place, any time. However, some of the content

might be hard to be understood by children, for instance, so this course would be

more advisable for teenagers or adults. Megías Rosa (2004) supports this idea in

his research about TBL for young learners, in which he defines that children are

not able to exercise complex tasks that demand complicated vocabulary or forms

of the language, and many times the function is not easily constructed, and usually

they will bombard the teacher with questions and doubts as they feel uncertain

about their decisions. They are not autonomous learners yet, and many of the

activities and resources require higher thinking skills which children are still

developing. Therefore, this eBook would be more suitable for adolescents and

adults.

This is an open course with a Creative Commons license that can be utilized as an

additional input for regular language classes to enrich the students' cultural

awareness, or for those autonomous language learners who wish to improve their

general knowledge for English cultures. ICT-enhanced learning requires devices

that focus on the student’s learning to have a positive influence on him (Alarcon

et al 2014). Using or even integrating these tools into the classroom has learning

advantages: they also save time and provide diversity of courses and methods,

making learning more active and content-focused. The openness and accessibility

of digital networks and the Internet have allowed the evolution of technologies

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 and have offered new perspectives, especially in the field of learning. E-learning

is an approach that uses ICT to enable the implementation of distance learning

processes. This type of learning is carried out through digital platforms that allow

the interaction of teachers with students through specific digital spaces supported

by the introduction of ICTs.

- Objective: Inquire into the main English speaking countries around the globe,

(UK, Canada, US, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand) where learners will

acquire a general knowledge about these anglophone cultures, in order to

contribute to the essential development of the cultural awareness of English

language users.

- Language level: This course is ideal for learners of English as a second or foreign

language with a minimum level of A2 in all of the communicative skills according

to the CEFRL, since much of its content is authentic, so very basic level students

may find it challenging to complete the tasks (Megías Rosa, 2004)

- Topic: Exploration of the main anglophone countries and their most relevant data,

cultural facts, gastronomy, people’s lifestyles, sports, nature, places and

architecture, typical expressions, customs, geography and history.

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4. DESIGN OF THE OER

- Stages in the design: Weebly is a great webpage builder with a variety of tools

that facilitated the creation of this eBook. There is a Home or introductory page,

followed by nine lessons to work with, plus a Final Doc or concluding resource.

As it has a task-based approach, each lesson has a series of tasks to complete with

a progressive focus: a pre-task, a main task, and a post-task, or as Harmer (2007)

resembles, they can be referred to as Engage, Study and Activate.

He explains how each one of these stages enhances effective learning and

communication in the language classroom. This sequence is a bridge to have

students feel emotionally engaged, then acquire the new knowledge being

interested and more contextualized on the topic, and a final stage in which they

put into practice what learnt. What is relevant from this strategy is that it can be

applied with a varied order according to students’ needs and learning styles.

The first task consists of a warm up that provides students some vocabulary or

practice to contextualize the main topic. Continuously, the principal task is split

into several parts for studying the topic first, and then students develop a written

or oral product. The post-task is additional job to wrap-up the topic. In this way,

a good learning procedure is carried out, with a gradual construction of

knowledge.

Lessons teach contents of varied topics because the idea was to attract students

with different personalities and preferences; besides, while one lesson focuses on

reading and writing, another one puts listening as speaking into practice. With

this, students feel they are not doing the same type of exercises all the time.

13
Something good about this eBook is that it can be adapted to students’ desires,

and teachers might use it as a guide or contribution to their curriculum. Indeed

any person with the desire to explore the anglophone culture might find this course

useful and utilize some of its tools for a specific requirement, as it was thought to

be studied freely and autonomously.

In terms of autonomy, the design of this platform encourages learners to bind in

the task as they comprehend its dynamics. As argued by Little (2009), to achieve

an autonomous classroom, three pedagogical principles need to profile a language

teacher. One of them is the learners’ involvement principle, in which they are their

own monitor and evaluate their own learning process. The second principle is the

learners’ reflection, which has to do with their self-assessment during the

development of the tasks. The third principle is the target language use, consisting

on that the main goal of being autonomous is the learning of the language itself.

Students, most of the times, can be aware of their protagonist roles using ICT

resources, and if they do not understand any portion of work, they are very likely

to go beyond and explore on the Web for an answer. In fact, many of the proposed

activities within the eBook invite students to do so.

A study conducted by Balçıkanlı (2010), defends the enthusiasm from students

when they are involved in the decision making processes of learning the language,

giving them the opportunity to learn for themselves, and this means that the

learning environment will be more focused and purposeful for them as they are

given some control to develop different tasks. Throughout many of the lessons,

learners are able to take advantage of their freedom to complete, monitor and

14
 verify their jobs without being told to do so; however, this eBook might be more

deeply covered and explained with the guidance of an experienced language

teacher.

- Elements: The materials used for this course were open, digital resources such as

videos, webpages, slides, documents to download, online recorders and editors,

images and links, and for students to present the tasks, they need a device

(computer, tablet or cell phone) with a camera, microphone, speakers or

headphones, and basic Apps for navigating, opening files, recording videos and

audios, or editing. Students might also need a notebook or a word document to

take notes and rehearse the activities.

Some of the tools included in this eBook were online games to practice vocabulary

and expressions such as GamesToLearnEnglish, authentic videos and

documentaries using Youtube or Edpuzzle to complete questions or fill-in gaps,

interactive maps in Padlet and other pages to explore the location of the countries

and their general information, online reading exercises, the use of quizzes in

Kahoot and other web pages with an immediate grading system to test their

progress in cultural knowledge, suggestion of tutorials to use tools such as

Screencastify, Amara, and Genially, the visualization of slides including

Slideshare, infographics using Canva, the creation of videos with Flexclip, and

many other links that were as unique and varied as possible.

- Format and visual aspects: Thinking about different learning styles, the chosen

resources to enhance listening, reading, writing and speaking skills included

visual and aural tools such as images, graphs, maps, slides, links, documents and

15
videos, which were mostly interactive, so that students could respond to them and

immediately have some feedback. Weebly makes incredible webpages with a

great visual interface, so the text and titles are clearly displayed and distributed in

harmony with the graphs, buttons, videos, maps, slides, links, documents and

images, which makes the page highly intuitive. The principal menu and the layout

in general are easy to capture, and there is at the end of each page a button that

addresses the user to the next lesson.

The use of authentic videos was a key element to comply with the objective of

culture acquisition. With the perception of movements and images through

videos, the messages and cultural aspects seem to have a clearer transmission for

the listener. Authentic videos differ from other types of videos in the sense that

students come to have a real perception of the issues that are normally seen in

everyday situations among native speakers as explained by Bouman since 1990.

Boylan (2006), for his part, highlights how essential pragmatics is for effective

communication, and this is due to the relevance of the interpretation of contexts

within speech acts, especially during interaction in a second language. According

to his theory, words and grammatical forms are meaningless if we separate them

from what they represent to language users; pragmatics becomes awareness of the

environment and context in which a conversation takes place.

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5. CONCLUSIONS

OERs are the future of pedagogy as they symbolize inclusion and no discrimination

for learning. Despite of the fact that presence classes are still very estimated, and many

students are not so keen on online instruction because of the absence of physical interaction

with classmates and the teacher, it has been demonstrated that if Web courses possess high

quality materials, appealing interfaces, and an intuitive use in general, then pupils are more

likely to prefer this virtual modality.

Blended Learning is a trendy methodology to balance face-to-face learning with e-

learning. In order to make OER a successful practice, there has to be a curation of the

materials, making sure they are suitable for the learning intentions and audience, accessible

and available to everyone, at anytime, anywhere, and in order to avoid troubles with

copyright, there is a Creative Commons license that lets users to copy, modify, adjust and

reuse the online artifacts.

The eBook exposed about exploring the anglophone cultures fits these requirements,

attempting to build cultural awareness on learners acquiring the English language,

contributing to their intercultural competence. There have been studies that evidence how

OERs incite learners to become more autonomous, especially when they feel involved on the

topics and curious to keep learning. Authentic materials were also of huge interest during the

design of the e-course since they embody to bring students closer to native speakers and real

life events. A great variety of sites, games, videos, images, links, documents and texts were

included to stimulate enthusiasm for learning, and to test students’ capacity to learn by

themselves. This eBook has been created to be updated, modified or adjusted whenever it is

necessary, or simply to be added or improved something new to deepen its contents.

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6. REFERENCES

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Nacional de Educación Enrique Guzmán y Valle, Chosica, 2013.

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- Boylan, P. (2006): La competenza interculturale attraverso l'insegnamento

comunicativo-culturale delle lingue. En Massimo Arcangeli & Alessandro Masi

(Eds.): Formare nei paesi d'origine per integrare in Italia. Roma: Società Dante Alighieri,

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