Innovation in Language Learning

Throughout the years, higher education instructors have adopted textbooks that would be used for a determined number of courses; in my experience, we use one textbook for two semesters, or the equivalent of one year. Students pay a significant amount of money for those textbooks, and personally, I feel obligated to use them in their totality, covering every chapter. However, are we really benefiting our students in doing so, when research has proved the student will learn in a natural order, no matter how we teach them? After a few semesters facing highly motivated students who were frustrated after not being able to understand the use of subjunctive in their 2^ndsemester of Spanish, as a department, we decided we needed to do what was best for the students. We started an OER (open educational resources) project.

-        First, after reviewing our CLOs (course learning outcomes) for our Spanish 1010 and Spanish 1020, we developed a list of concepts, grammar points, vocabulary and cultural aspects our students would need in order to succeed in these courses.

-        Then, we revised the available material to decide if we needed to adopt, adapt or create OERs for our courses. We decided to adapt what we found, and expanded to cover what we decided we needed.

-        Finally, we implemented our new materials for both courses.

This paper is the result of our experience. I will share pieces of advise, I will acknowledge things I would have done differently, and I will share the benefits we have encountered so far.