ANOTHER LEARNING IS POSSIBLE: CROWD SOURCING, OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

ABSTRACT The use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) has called the attention of educational researchers for the contribution they may bring to learning, including language teaching. One of the problems found, however, is the difficulty of OERs to adapt to different learning contexts because they come ready made for the teacher and are resistant to changes. The main objective of this paper is to describe the results of an authoring system that allows teachers to produce and/or adapt OERs that serve the specific needs of their students. Using this authoring system, based on open source code, teachers, within the massive collaboration approach supported by the system, can disassemble OERs into their basic components, reassemble them with modifications and redistribute them to other teachers. These other teachers, in turn, using the elastic modularity principle embedded in the system, may repeat the process and introduce new modifications, creating a large repository, without practical limits in terms of access, storing space and modification possibilities. The results, according to examples produced and modified by the teachers, show, on the positive side, the capability of the system to produce different OERs adapted to different learning contexts. On the other hand, the need for teachers to adapt themselves to the virtual world, producing more interactive materials, well beyond the printed text on paper, is also felt.