This is a pitch to the Linguistics Faculty at BYU that teach the TESOL courses. The English Language Center at BYU exists to support the TESOL students by providing a place to practice applying their learning and research. The ELC has implemented OER, but we are still hoping to encourage more faculty to get involved in creating, sharing, and using these resources.
Thanks for coming to this presentation today about Open Educational Resources that we're using at the English language center, and how we'd like to get the TESOL faculty more involved in the creation and sharing of those resources.
Now, open educational resources are materials that are copyrightable, but they are shared in the public domain, or with the license that allows them to be free and used unrestricted.
And that means: retaining, revising, remixing, reusing, and redistributing. We can talk about that in more detail later, but it's just basically the idea that these materials are shared so others can use them as needed.
And at the ELC, we have in our mission statement the idea that we share our scholarship for the benefit of others, which is really this idea of openness and sharing what we know with others.
Now we have the most incredible students and teachers at the English Language Center that are very creative and enthusiastic about teaching and learning, and we want to share that with others.
Some of our current projects are listening and speaking books, writing textbooks, and even positive psychology in ESL classroom. And these are all great things that our students have been working on.
In the last year, we’ve had undergraduates, graduate students, community teachers, full time administrators. Some working with me and some with Ben on positive psychology work.
And the benefit for this is that they get to apply what they're learning in the TESOLclasses both the content and pedagogical knowledge, and they get to then pilot in their actual classrooms to see how it works.
They also gain a publication and a resource that they can continue using, no matter where in the world they go after graduation, which is all very exciting.
The benefits for the TESOL program is that this brings more recognition to our program for our contributions to the field. Recently, Ben Mcmurray and I gave a presentation at TESOL about this very topic.
We'd love for these types of classes to get more involved because the students are learning this great material, and they could actually learn by creating things to share openly.
And you can see in this graphic that the things that we have already created and shared openly, are being used worldwide, really showing that we're building global leaders in TESOL. Thank you!