OER at a bilingual university seems very challenging. That’s why I was intrigued by the lighting talk from Open Ed 2021 entitled “Challenges and Opportunities of OER at a Bilingual Canadian University” presented by Michelle Brown and Melanie Brunet from the University of Ottawa, a bilingual Canadian university. They mentioned that the University of Ottawa provides courses and resources for 42,000 students with 70% studying in English and 30% in French. The university has the mandate to promote both cultures and services in both languages. They compared textbook costs for the highest enrolment undergraduate programs in English and French. English courses were much more expensive. The English language dominates in OER. They mentioned that the Francophone population worldwide is estimated to be 3.1% in 2018 and 4.7 in Ontario (2016). I also didn’t know that Franco-Ontarians have their own dialect! The presenters suggested that there are fewer OER in French because tuition costs in Francophone countries are lower. Copyright laws in French language countries are also different and more restrictive. These challenges contribute to assimilation into the majority English-speaking systems. The University of Ottawa is now encouraging more co-creation with students of Francophone OER. I had not considered linguistic equity gaps!
CommonLit is a free online reading program and Karrin Thompson presented a lightning talk entitled “Closing K-12 Opportunity Gaps in the Pandemic and Beyond: First Digitally-Native OER ELA Curriculum.” CommonLit is an education non-profit based in Washington, DC. The CommonLit 260 curriculum is freely available. Thompson mentioned that their digital platform allows font resizing and translation. There is also a read-out-loud feature! Students can also annotate the text. Student comprehension is tested with short quizzes as they read along. Teachers have access to real-time student data. In response to the question “Why Open?” Thompson mentioned that their mission is to make content accessible. Evaluation of the curriculum suggests that learners are engaged and improve on assessments. The number of users since the pandemic has doubled to over 22 million! I thought the demonstration of the platform was impressive: the dynamic resizing of text and lesson format was really nice. I wonder if there is a similar platform out there for sharing of protocols?
