Ixchell Reyes 0:00
Are we inadvertently sticking students outside of a learning paywall? If you’re still using pricey textbooks, there are other options, and open educational resources are one of them. We’ll break it down in Episode 127 of the DIESOL podcast.

Brent Warner 0:28
Welcome to the DIESOL podcast, where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College, and as always, I’m here with the wonderful Ixchell Reyes, award winning educator in innovation and professional development, specializing in teacher training with an edtech focus. Ixchell, how are you?

Ixchell Reyes 0:48
I am pretty good. I think,

Brent Warner 0:53
yeah, yeah, yeah. The right here, we might have to go back to the What are you doing these days? Question, What are you up to?

Ixchell Reyes 1:02
Yeah, what are you doing? What? How are you creating? What are you creating?

Brent Warner 1:07
Are you? Are you getting your runs in these days?

Ixchell Reyes 1:11
Yeah, and I’ve actually lengthened my goals, so now I’m trying to do a three – I’m trying to, okay, this is a crazy goal, but since we’re talking about it, 10 Minute plank, I’ve reached three minute plank,

Brent Warner 1:26
oh, okay, 10 Minute planks, that’s a thing.

Ixchell Reyes 1:29
It’s a mental challenge, not the physical challenge. I mean more for

Brent Warner 1:33
Yeah, for sure.

Ixchell Reyes 1:35
But you’re creating things, too

Brent Warner 1:36
Planks would be a physical challenge for me, too. (laughter) Yes, I am creating an OER for my class. So I think we mentioned it briefly on a previous show, but today we figured we’d dig in a little bit to it, kind of see what’s going on. It’s a little bit in my in my mind, it feels like it hasn’t been developed as it could be for ESL. And so we’re going to be talking about open educational resources and the OER world a bit, and what I’m doing with it.

Ixchell Reyes 2:11
So, all right, so you’ve already given us the term OER, but I actually had not. I don’t think I’d heard it before. So tell us more. What is an OER?

Brent Warner 2:30
And yeah, so open educational resource is the idea that, you know, people in the field are already experts on the content knowledge, and that we don’t necessarily need to have books provided to us by major publishers and and to the students by major publishers. A lot of teachers have created their own materials and kind of enough materials for students to get through without necessarily having to buy a book. And this has been around for a long, long time. And so it’s like, how can we provide those same materials to students, or perhaps even better materials than what they’re getting from the traditional textbook? And so the goal with an OER is to create a high quality and the open part is really important, a high quality resource that is open to everybody, meaning that anyone out there could take it. They could say, Hey, I like this. I’m going to remix it. I’m going to update some of the content to match my needs and my students needs, but I’m going to use this as a fundamental and then I’m going to to, you know, share it out with my own students again, well, with not charging them for it. And so this, the idea here has existed for a long time. It’s grown quite a bit with, like, the digital age and all of these kinds of things, because it’s much easier to distribute and share content digitally than it was to say, like, Hey, I’ve got this book that anybody can use for it couldn’t have been free with a paper versions completely, because there’s a physical material cost. But the idea now is, how do we provide good resources to our students that doesn’t cost them money to get through? Because, as you know, so many of these books cost so much money for students, right?

Ixchell Reyes 4:16
So you’re talking about sharing sources, and that can get tricky. So what, where do you find these sources?

Brent Warner 4:26
Yeah, so there are lots of repositories online. The biggest problem, I think, with OER is that they’re not very well centered, like they’re not consolidated. And so you can go around to all of these different places. So there are places like, I’m using Libra texts, l, i, b, r, e, t, e, x, t, s, but there are other ones, like OER Commons, some people here might have heard of Open Stacks. There’s a company called. Press books. Anyways, all of these different organizations or groups are out there. And then you kind of have to go online and search to find them and piecemeal together what you’re looking for in order to make it work. And so you do have to give credit, of course, just like we do as scholars, right? Saying, Hey, this came from this person, or whatever else it is. But you kind of you some of these are really well built. So for example, I found a couple of ones that I really liked on libretexts, and then I’m taking them and I’m redoing them in ways that work for me and for my students. And so it might just be that the contents already there, someone built out this grammar, you know, grammar, chapters and all these different things. And I’m like, I really like how they presented it, but I want to change parts of it. And so yes, there are many, many places out there, but it is not centralized.

Ixchell Reyes 5:50
So you’re saying that these materials are things you can or artifacts that you can edit, and then Brent, like, I guess you’re making it your own, yeah, as long as you’re giving credit to the original source, and someone’s just made it available because they don’t need to make money out of it. Yeah.

Brent Warner 6:09
So it’s like, so the idea here is, so a lot of people have heard of the Creative Commons license, I think so it’s like, Hey, you can use this, you can remix it, or you have to give credit for it, or no credit necessary. There’s all these different levels that are kind of different than copyright. They’re like, they’re much more about sharing and making things available to other people. And so there’s a big movement around Creative Commons. I am not going to be able to get into the depth of like, every single you know, like this type of, this type of this type of licenses for this, and this type of licenses for that, but, but again, you can go get a lot of good materials out there for free and then, and then use those as your starting point. So the as long as the original person said, Hey, this is meant to be an open educational resource or Creative Commons at some level, then you can take it, you can use it and mix it up in the way that you want to

Ixchell Reyes 7:06
use. So taking it back to our classes, you’ve worked on a couple, maybe, or you already have one then, and which, which subject or what topics have you started diving into? And what, what has that entailed?

Brent Warner 7:21
So I’m doing mine for a grammar class that I’m teaching. It’s new to me. I haven’t taught this class before, but I’ve kind of always wanted to teach it. I do love the grammar classes, even, you know, they’re just kind of old fashioned and nerdy, but, but I like getting into it and so, so I was like, Okay, well, we have this grammar books out there, and they’re they’re good, they’re fine, you know. But also, like, they cost students a lot of money, and, you know, whatever else it is. So I said, hey, what if I build an OER, especially now today, where students could, like, I could also build some AI interactive bots for them to, like, practice the ideas on. I just thought it was, like, a really good opportunity and a time. And so what I’m doing is I’m building this OER as I’m going through the class with my students and kind of seeing what they’re responding to, what’s useful for them, what’s not, but it’s, it’s all a it’s all grammar stuff, right? So right now we’re doing lots of verb tense things, kind of continuing on with that, we’ll be doing active and passive voice, you know, verbs with two objects, you know, like all these different different ideas inside of here that are just some basic grammar things, but trying to present them in ways that are interesting to my students. And so, like I said, I’m going through that. I’m building it as we go, and I am using AI to help me with the process. I’ll talk about that in a little bit, but, but kind of because I’m trying to share relevant materials or things that might be interesting to the students that are different from what traditional textbooks always talk about, or at least somewhat different. And so what I’m trying to do, and this is something that’s really nice about doing this as you’re building, is I’m actually trying to customize a lot of the conversation around, you know, Southern California and Orange County culture history, you know, celebrities, movers and shakers, like all those kinds of things, so that people kind of get a feel. My students in particular, kind of get a feel and learn a little bit about the history of the area where they live now and what has come out of, you know, Orange County, California.

Ixchell Reyes 9:32
That is pretty cool. So does this mean that you’re not using a traditional textbook, or is that right now? Okay, so you’ve done with away with a textbook?

Brent Warner 9:40
Yeah, completely gone. So, yeah, so they’re not paying anything for it. The there are some problems. We’ll talk about this in a little bit. But basically, everything gets uploaded online. If the students want to click a button, they could download a PDF of it as we’re going through things. So if they wanted to print things out. They could. But everything for us, since we use Canvas, is all uploaded directly into Canvas.

Ixchell Reyes 10:06
For them, very cool. So all right, let’s go ahead and discuss the problems with doing an OER, because it sounds like you spent, you’ve spent some time, yeah, putting this together.

Brent Warner 10:19
So one, if you are like me, and you know, like, you see something, and then you’re like, it’s not quite good enough. It’s not quite good enough, that starts taking some real time. So essentially, it’s like, Hey, I like these materials. But then I get into, like, my own design,

Ixchell Reyes 10:39
that flavor, I get it. I get it, I get it. I want it

Brent Warner 10:43
to look good, right? I actually posted about this recently how important. I actually did a post for TESOL recently about how important Good design is, and like why it matters. And so because students nowadays, they really have an expectation of high quality design, all things that they interact with, right? And so there are a lot of teachers out there that are there that are still handing out, like, you know, Microsoft photocopies of photocopies of PDFs of whatever, and it’s like, super blurry, and it’s not, you know, it was, it was laid out on a typewriter, however, many years ago, right? As compared to what really students have high, high, high expectations. Basically, if you go look at like Apple design, go to the Apple website, or, you know, buy an Apple product, or whatever else it is, like, that is kind of the standard that students are expecting. Like they want things to look good and clear and so anyways, one thing that I did find is that you can use AI, especially with the program that I’m using. I’m using libretexts, so it’s kind of HTML based. And so I can use AI to say, hey, here’s all the content that I’m working with. Make this look really good in an HTML layout, and, you know, and break it down into these sections. And so then I can just copy that HTML and pop it right in. And so now it looks like a really clean I’m also kind of trying to brand it with my own school colors, because it’s going in for my school. So it’s like, all of these little bits here that are just, like, nice touches that kind of add to the level of professionalism. And you know, students look at that and they’re like, oh, okay, hold on a second. This is high quality, so I can work with this, right? And so that part is does take some time. And you know, it certainly is taking me a lot more time than it would be just to say, go buy a book, and we’re going to work with that. But over time, I can keep on rebuilding this and fixing it and making it work. One other problem that I’ve had is implementing activities themselves, right? So when we have a paper book, and it’s like, Hey, here’s how you use modals. And then immediately on the page is like, here’s 15 questions, where you can practice using the modals. Okay, great. On digital form, that is much, much harder, right? And so when it’s uploaded into an LMS, you know, you can, of course, make a second page that maybe has, like, you know, I could use, like, the quiz feature inside of the LMS as part of them. But also, like, I am a believer, you know, as much as we talk about technology, I’m a believer in the value of, like, handwriting things, right? And so then we’re like, Okay, well, you’ve got this digital thing, and then on another piece of paper, you’re going to write out the answers to these questions. So, like, I haven’t found something that makes me totally satisfied in the quality of students being able to get the access to the information and then immediately start working on it. Unless you know I’m I’ve done some things where I printed out handouts for the students to practice. I’ve done some things where I say, do it online. And I haven’t totally found a very smooth system that I like

Ixchell Reyes 13:42
I see. So what? How do you find the students, I guess. How are they reacting to it? Are they expecting a textbook? Are some of them asking? Why aren’t we? Because I’ve had students who want a textbook,

Brent Warner 14:00
and so, yeah, they have this. This my first semester doing it. And this class was mostly just happy that they didn’t have to buy a book. Oh, hey, that’s when, yeah. So it was like, that was the first conversation with them is, like, you don’t have to buy anything. You can just come into the class and I’m providing everything for you. And so they were pretty happy about that. I think there are some interaction options that are a little bit tricky. One of the things that I made a mistake on was I was exporting all of these things to PDF, and then I was uploading the PDFs into our LMS. And I learned recently that you don’t need to do that, because the problem that happened is, when they scroll through the PDFs in Canvas, it’s like multi page, right? And sometimes it splits it up in the middle of, you know, in the middle of a table, that’s explaining an idea. And so that doesn’t look very good, right? And so what you can do, and what I didn’t know that you can do, is, at least with libretext, which is what I’m using, is you can upload the entire HTML so it’s just a smooth inner. Interactive experience, or semi interactive experience for them. So it they are. So I have made my own few mistakes inside of that. Now I’m recognizing, hey, I want to do this. I should point out, though we’ve got other faculty on campus, and especially in the ESL department, some of them are like, No, we don’t want we were building OERs, but we don’t want them to be all digital. We still want them to be printable. So they’re doing everything in Microsoft Word, which is something that you can do, right? It doesn’t have to be built into one of these systems. It can just be, hey, we’ve got just paper. And, you know, we can print this out for all of our students that might not be tech savvy or know how to get on computers. So there’s all sorts of different ways that you can implement these things. Very cool. All right, so we are coming up on the TESOL virtual convention. Ixchell, are you aware of the dates I’m putting you on the spot of the virtual convention?

Ixchell Reyes 16:00
I’m not. I have actually, like, mostly left social

Brent Warner 16:03
media these days, yeah. So basically, we have you. So let us know I know when it is Friday and Saturday, November, 21 and 22nd they’re also doing two days, like a pre day and a post day. So the 20th, they’re doing a graduate student forum and the and on the Sunday, they’re doing a pre K 12 day, which is kind of cool, because a lot of I think, you know TESOL, we’ve talked about this in the past, but like TESOL and CATESOL and all these groups like have a tend to have so many teachers who are kind of higher ed or adult ed, and not as Much focus on the K 12 world. And so I’m glad that they have something going on for that. But regardless, if you’re interested in going, I have been given a discount code for anybody who’s planning on going, 20% off. And so if you want to go, and if you’re planning on going, the code you can use, and we’ll leave it in the show notes as well. Is B, W, V, C, 2025,

Ixchell Reyes 17:08
As in Brent Warner?

Brent Warner 17:10
I thought it was Be, Well, Very Cool. (laughter) I guess that’s right. My name: Brent Warner, Virtual Convention, okay, but anyways, so BWVC2025, if you want 20% off for the TESOL virtual convention. You can plan ahead now, because that’s in November.

Ixchell Reyes 17:37
All right, so if I wanted to get started on an OER, because I eventually probably will want to do the same. Where do I even start? You mentioned a few resources already.

Brent Warner 17:50
Yeah, So the one that I’m using is libretexts, l, i, b, r, e, t, e, x, t, s, dot, O, R, G. If you’re at a school, or if you reach out to them, you can kind of get, you can go onto the website, and there’s tons and tons of stuff. The only thing that I would say just to be aware of is that it kind of started off in the sciences, right? So a lot of the science professors started building these things early. And so while there are quite a lot of ESL ones or language learning ones, you still kind of have to do some searching to find what’s going to match with your needs. One of the things that is important when you’re building an OER is to build a plan for an outline, so that you know what you’re actually trying to take and plug in from out there in the world. So anyways, you can start with libretexts. That’s kind of where I’ve started. A lot of other people start with the OER Commons or Open Stacks. We’ll have links to all of these in the show notes. And then there’s one other one. There’s actually quite a lot of other ones, but one that’s called press books. And so going back to the conversation of design, this one definitely has the best, beautiful design for it, like being able to design things and make them look very good, but it’s also very much a for profit model. So which seems to go well, yeah, so the schools or the the individual has to pay to kind of get access to and build it. And so it’s like, kind of goes against the spirit in some ways, of the OER thing where it’s like, oh, we see that there’s this thing where people are trying to provide free things for everybody, and we’ll just charge them for it’s like, Well, okay, it’s a little bit tricky, but at the same time, much better looking. You know, good integrate visual integrations and those kinds of things. So, so you can take a look around. You can see, like I said, Get started with some of those places. And then if you are at a school and you have a librarian, you could also talk to them about it. We have, we happen to be lucky enough at my school to have a specific OER librarian, this is, like, her whole specialty. So that is so cool. Yeah, it’s great. We’ve learned quite a bit about it, and it’s very much about, like, how to help the students. Support them through the processes and everything. But, you know, start, start the process there, I guess, and see what it where it goes.

Ixchell Reyes 20:09
So talking about being able to put it on an LMS, what other like? What is the way that you integrate it with your class? Or how do you disseminate it?

Brent Warner 20:20
Yeah. So, like I said, mine is an LMS embeds. You know, that’s canvas. You see canvas, but it does work for most LMSs, like, so if you’re on Blackboard, or what’s that one bright space, or, you know, all these different ones. So whichever one you’re on, they kind of have buttons that you can click to do an export and import type of thing. But then inside of there, every page also has, like a download as a PDF thing. So the students, if they’re still like, hey, I want my own printed copy, they can download a PDF and print or print individual pages, one at a time, which is really a nice feature. So they say, Hey, I’m going to be offline, or I just work better on paper or all those kinds of things and so and then, like I said, the last one is physical print copies. Some of these ones, you know, they basically let you print at cost, right? So it’s just so if a student wants to do it, instead of paying, you know, 75 bucks for a textbook or whatever it else it is that they’re going to get, they can pay $7 for the full print version of it, you know, and then get it. And some of them even, do you know, depending on your school or whatever else it is, could be binding or different things. So, so again, just really reducing the costs. There are kind of lots, endless different ways to do them. Whether you want to go fully digital or fully paper, you have your choice.

Ixchell Reyes 21:43
And what are some final thoughts? Because it seems like it’s a labor of love, yeah, but I don’t want to scare anyone, and I think you should always look for ways to make your content better. And if I just think, if it’s efficient,

Brent Warner 21:59
why not? Yeah, I think one thing that’s great about it is, when you’re doing this, it makes you much stronger in the content you’re teaching, because you’re spending real time interacting with it. I feel like one thing that happens with some teachers is like, they get the book and they’re just like, Okay, well, let’s just open up to page, you know, 17, and I’ll just figure it out as we’re talking about as we’re going through, because I know this well enough, right? And it’s like, but here, when you’re doing these things, it’s really nice because you do much deeper dives into it, and you’re like, you’re thinking about the content that you’re presenting to your students. And so so I like that, because I feel like I’m getting my own deeper retraining on the grammar points before I’m going in and teaching them to my classes. So I like that a lot, but definitely it is a labor of love. You’re not going to get out of it, what you financially, what you’re putting into it, time wise, right? But your students will Right? Like that, money is going to come back in, you know, into the world somehow, right? And so the more you use it, for sure, it’s going to be a better, a better option for many people over time. And so a couple of things we’ve talked about this on so many different things, when you’re integrating tech or whatever else it is, just start small. Do one lesson, one activity, right? Just provide them with the materials. And if you start saying, hey, that work. My students liked it. We did this activity. It didn’t cost them anything. I am 100% sure that everybody who’s listening to this episode has already built content that is not made from a textbook, right? And so, so it’s like you’ve already started making OER in certain ways, right? And now you’re just saying, How do I organize that in a way that it could work across the entire semester or the entire term, that is absolutely doable, and especially if you’re just thinking of it in terms of, like, okay, next week’s lessons. What can I make and provide? And then just start saving those and organizing them, and it will be much, much less work later on.

Ixchell Reyes 23:54
And just as a guy had a question popped up, you’re doing this now for grammar. Have you found that you have to update content.

Brent Warner 24:04
So yes and no, I grammar is pretty static. I mean that not totally. We have to talk to our students about that, but, but you can make a lot of you can make changes instantly. So when you go in again, like I’m using libretext. If I make a change in libretext, it will automatically update the Canvas page inside of there, because it’s all just pulling in as an embed for that part. But yes, you can make instant updates. So for example, one of the resources that I pulled the teacher who had written the original materials talked a lot about, you know, his life in Seattle, and, you know, his two sons as examples, right? They were pretty personal, not, you know, not deeply personal, but personalized to that teacher and what the things that he probably talks about in his classes, right? And so what I did is, I’m like, Oh, well, I don’t need those. Those are not points that are going to work for me. Um. I actually ran a lot of them through AI, and I said, hey, here are the first names of many of my students. Please rotate through these and so use, use my own students names as replacements for the generic ones that you have inside of here, so that I did customize out for all of my students. I try to bring in cultural concepts that so say, like, bring up things that are from Chinese culture or from Ukrainian culture, or whatever else it is, right? And so that the students feel like there are points of interest, and that they are recognizing themselves or their own lives or experiences inside of the content. And so some of those things are really, you can do the full customization, but I do really want to re emphasize this, because I’m not as good as it as I should be, which is using other content that’s already built. Just pull it on over, right? That should be your starting point. You don’t need to start everything from scratch. You’re meant to be using the shared content and using that as a way to build more and more

Ixchell Reyes 25:56
Very cool. We look forward to hearing about what you’ve done with writing in the future.

Brent Warner 26:00
Yes, well, it will be, this will be publicly available once it’s done, you know, so, so if you want this, if you want this grammar, OER, at the end of this semester, it will be fully completed, and so I will make sure that I share it out with everybody. Too. Awesome.

Ixchell Reyes 26:19
All right, it is time for our fun finds, and I have been playing a lot of games, sort of to to release some anxiety, and I recently learned how to play DRock. Have you ever heard of it? Rock? It translates, I believe, to the fool in Ukrainian. It’s a card game if you’re a fan of blackjack or also like if you’re mixed, if you’re bluffing, if you like bluffing games and psychological strategy type games. It’s got a little bit of all those. There isn’t an American game that quite matches it, and it’s a lot of fun. So I would say go on YouTube and I’ll link one of the tutorials on on how to play the

Brent Warner 27:04
rock, wonderful, great mine. I’ve mentioned this show several times in the past. I think Ixchell is the last drive in. It’s a horror host movie show, whatever they show, like kind of campy horror movies. And then the host, Joe Bob Briggs, comes in and talks about him. But every episode, he does these, like long, kind of brilliant rants. I’ve mentioned this before. I do want to kind of give a special shout out to one of the ones he did just this weekend, last Friday, I think on the third I guess it was third of October 2025 was the final terror. Was the name of the episode. He went on this crazy rant where it was wonderful, it’s totally brilliant. But he basically was talking about, you know, essentially, we’re, you know, with things like the parks shutting down and, you know, the like fish and wild, like closing down. He’s like, he’s like, Well, all of these things, like when we shut them all down. Like, he went on and on and on about how it’s problematic, because so many of us really like and enjoy but the but, but at the same time, he was flipping it and saying, well, actually what this is, is it’s really wonderful for this specific sub genre of horror, of, like, hillbilly horror or or like, you know, camping in The woods horror, right? He was saying, essentially, in the, you know, in the 60s and 70s, when, when some of these first movies were coming out, everybody was really scared of going out into the woods. And then he’s like, but the reality is, once they started actually going out to Yosemite and all these places, they saw how well marked they were, how what a good job all the Rangers did to clean everything up, exactly where to park, where to where to camp, all these different things, he said. So people were like, not scared of camping. And he’s like, but now, with all of these things closed down, and nobody working in these things, they’re going to be scary again. So he said he’s like, so good. This is really great for the sub genre of horror of, you know, camping in the woods, slash, you know, whatever those types of things are. So it was one of the most cleverly put together rants I have ever seen. And if you have access to that show, whether it be on shutter or AMC or something like that, it was the last the season seven, Episode 15 of the Last Drive-In. And it was the Final Terror is about the first 20 minutes or so of the episode.

Ixchell Reyes 29:23
Very cool. All right, for the show notes and other episodes, check us out@diesol.org slash 127 you can find us on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram, and we are at DIESOL pod.

Brent Warner 29:41
You can find me on some of the socials at @BrentGWarner,

Ixchell Reyes 29:47
And you can’t really find me these days (laughter) but if you do, I’m somewhere at Ixy_Pixy with underscores, perhaps more than one underscore. That’s where I’m gonna leave it.

Brent Warner 29:59
Okay And emailing you is fine.

Ixchell Reyes 30:03
Then the pigeon, (laughter) yeah, there we go. Thank you for listening to the show.

Brent Warner 30:08
Thanks everybody. Take care!