Dr. Michael Cartmill SPAN 1010 Beginning Spanish I

Textbook: Spanish 1010 at Utah Tech—Dr. Cartmill located at https://uen.pressbooks.pub/span1010cartmill/ 

Materials included some embedded videos, some H5P activities already created, but most of the content is explanations, vocabulary tables, and grammar charts by the author and many other H5P activities created by the author.

Cost savings is about $108 from the traditional book used for years at the university.

Curricular changes:

One of the main changes would be the addition of weekly quizzes to check for understanding of the material covered. The format of the class changed from just a “Chapter” which could take any number of weeks or an arbitrary number of days, to weekly content which allowed a more consistent assessment.

Teaching and learning impacts: 

I think the inclusion of interactive activities has led students to access the text much more often than with a traditional textbook which would expose them to the material more often and thus impact learning.

The outcome is similar for teaching in that I teach from the text more than before when I would just give my own explanations and use the board rather than the text in many cases.

OER Adoption Process

The main motivation was a combination of creating free materials to save students money and control of the content. There was recently a new OER in place for this course, however it focused on peninsular examples (Spain), needed more content and explanation and included either vocabulary or other content not consistent with my own teaching.

Student feedback about using OER:  In general, they were very appreciative of the efforts to save them money. The interactive activities were fun and easy. The grading (communication between pressbooks and Canvas) had issues, a number of times, which was very frustrating. Some students did the entire homework for the week multiple times at times to get the score to show up. Additionally the fact that pressbooks doesn’t show them which specific activities were already completed and with what score within the text was also a source of frustration.

Instructor Name:

Michael Cartmill

Dr. Cartmill has been teaching Spanish for 29 years specializing in Latin America and literature. He is a certified medical interpreter and teaches translation and interpretation as well. He is a strong advocate for Study Abroad and life-long education.