This post was contributed by Amy Stancliff, Faculty, Central Oregon Community College.
Proposal and Plan
Initially, I proposed to create several modules within the course, ED 253: Learning Across the Lifespan, that I teach to both replace portions of the textbook and create more access for my Spanish-speaking students. I knew I was going to have a number of students who would be accessing as many materials in Spanish as possible and would also be submitting their work to me in Spanish. (We have a cohort of Spanish-speaking students who either take their ED courses in Spanish, or register for courses, like mine, where the instructor speaks Spanish.) Instead of having them translate the materials, I wanted to have a portion of their materials in Spanish.
As I thought about how I wanted to do this, I began researching, reviewing materials, and meeting with OER experts (thank you Kirsten Hostetler!). I decided that instead of creating several modules, it would be better to include OER materials, in both English and Spanish, in all of the course modules. I wanted to have resources that specifically focused on the key concepts in each module, so both English and Spanish speaking students would have access to the most important concepts via OER.
Course Information and Content
The course is an online course and was taught in the Spring term (March 30-June 11, 2026). There were a total of 27 students in the course and 5 of them accessed materials and turned in all of their work in Spanish. Several others are bilingual (Spanish/English) but I don’t have any data if they accessed the materials in Spanish.
The course modules consist of the following topics:
- Week 1: Introduction: Educational Psychology
- Week 2: Cognitive Development
- Week3: Understanding Ourselves and Others
- Week 4: Diverse Learning Needs
- Week 5: Social, Cultural, and Linguistic Heritage
- Week 6: Midterm: Views of Learning
- Week 7: Learning Environments
- Week 8: Learning and Motivation
- Week 9: Guiding Student Learning
- Week 10: Final: Assessing Student Engagement
These are the OER materials that I included or created:
- Week 1: Guide on different types of experiments in psychology (English and Spanish)
- Week 2: Informational page on Vygotsky and Piaget (English and Spanish)
- Week 3: Summary on Eurie Bronfenbrenner and the different systems within his model (English and Spanish)
- Week 4: Erikson’s Stages of development guide (English and Spanish)
- Week 5: Midterm, N/A
- Week 6: Creativity and Intelligence Unit (unit in English but I recreated in Spanish)
- Week 7: Bloom’s Taxonomy Summary Sheet (English and Spanish); Three main learning theories (English and Spanish)
- Week 8: LAPU Digital Learning Solutions video (subtitles in Spanish); OER Commons module on motivation
- Week 9: Constructivism in the Classroom chapter , (chapter in English but I recreated it in Spanish)
- Week 10: Final, N/A
Impact and Feedback
Overall, I felt like the OER materials that I added were helpful for students, specifically for highlighting and summarizing the most important elements of each week’s module. The Early Childhood Education Program at our institution has purchased books for all students to use through the reserve system at our library. I believe we need to make use of the books as long as they are current. However, the textbook is quite dense and so I feel like the OER materials were really an added value, to both the English and Spanish speakers, but probably especially the Spanish speakers.
This is the fourth time I have taught this course and overall, I feel like the student engagement and performance was excellent. I didn’t have any students drop or withdraw from the course, and all but two of the students turned in assignments consistently. I can’t say what impact that the OER materials had on this characteristic of this specific group of students, but it was noticeably improved from previous terms. I will be teaching the same course next term (Summer 2026), again with the OER changes, and it will be interesting to see what the student engagement and performance is like.
I asked for some of my Spanish-speaking students to share their feedback on the addition of the materials. These are some of the responses (translated to English) I received:
“Having materials in Spanish has been a great help to me because it allows me to better understand the class concepts and feel more confident while learning. The fact that the school offers services and resources in Spanish makes a big difference, as it gives us access to information in our own language and allows us to participate more fully in the course.” M. R.
“Thanks to the Spanish-language resources . . . provided for us, I have been able to overcome language barriers because I have the motivation and the desire to improve myself. Doors would be closed to my professional development if I didn’t have these resources. Spanish resources are a great help because they allow us to better understand the classes we are assigned.” M. J.
Acknowledgements and Thanks
I want to thank Oregon Open Educational Resources for the support with this project. I also appreciate the help and guidance I received from Amy Hofer and Kirsten Hostetler throughout the year. I enjoyed the process and learned a lot while doing it!
