Muhlenberg

With help from colleagues and a tech-savvy student, Muhlenberg College’s Assistant Professor of Italian Daniel Leisawitz and Italian Lecturer Daniela Viale spent the summer creating their own digital textbook for the course.

Spunti: Italiano Elementare 1 is an Open Educational Resource, which means it is publicly available online, not just for classroom or personal use, but also to be adapted by creators of other OERs or used as-is, for free, by instructors at other institutions.

Jarrett Azar ‘20, from Fogelsville, a computer science and studio art double major who is also a digital learning assistant, and Senior Instructional Design Consultant Tim Clarke used images, videos and Microsoft Word files from Leisawitz and Viale to build Spunti.

Azar said he was glad to be involved in this initial project.

“I knew what an OER was before, but I’ve grown a lot in wanting them to be a big initiative on Muhlenberg’s campus,” he said. “Something that’s always been important to me is trying to eliminate those secondary costs of college.”

Given Muhlenberg’s strong tradition of faculty-student collaboration, Clarke anticipates faculty exploring OERs may want to involve students in the process of adapting existing content and creating new content to be used in the classroom.