OEG Voices 056: OE Award Winner Giovanni Zimotti

We have a pretty big Spanish program with around 801,000 students per semester. And my goal for this program right now is fully switch every single level to OER textbooks (followed by multiple voice intro)

Here we are again in the OEG Voices Podcast studio, and I'm really pleased to welcome Giovanni Zamoti, who's coming to us. I didn't even ask where in Iowa you were. I know you're in Iowa. Where are you?

I'm in Iowa City.

Iowa City. Fantastic. Well, welcome to this show. Like I said, we do this very informally, but we want to talk a lot about your work in OER, but especially calling out your receiving of the OER Awards for Excellence in the Educator category. How did it feel to get that award? What was your reaction?

It was unexpected. I was really happy to receive this award, recognized the work I've been doing for the last four or five years, basically since I arrived to Iowa and I started teaching and working here as a program director. Didn't know much about the world of open educational resources. I got into a project that was a small project that I think now failed, but it was a project that was a combination of various universities trying to create resources for student assessment for various topics. I was in the third court or the second court. They were trying to develop this platform where they would keep all the question banks or various subjects. Me and six or seven other Spanish professors worked on creating questions banks for Spanish, elementary Spanish one and two. I actually used them in my program, and that was like my first introduction.

After that, I started diving into more into the Oyrwad. This was my introduction. There was an issue with some publishers that they stopped publishing some more niche textbook for Spanish, for the professions, healthcare, and nothing existed for education professionals. With one colleague of mine, we were like, okay, we need to teach a classroom about Spanish for educators, professionals. We don't have a textbook. What do we do? And we were like, okay, we're going to write our own textbook. We are not going to deal with traditional publishers. We're just going to do it in OER, save a lot of money for our students.

And then from that textbook, it all started. And I have been involved into OER since then.

Oh, that's so beautiful. And you read my mind and asked the question, because I like to ask people how they got into OER, but let's dial back even further. Tell me about the place you grew up. I understand it's a small village in southern Italy.

Yes. So I grew up in Canyono Varano. It's a very small town in the south of Italy. It's beautiful. We have a lake, beach, mountain. So there is basically everything right in like a 10 miles radius.

What kind of kid were you? Did you like school? Were you motivated by school? What was your early educational experience?

I was a good student, but I didn't like school, so I didn't like doing homework. I was good. I was never risked failing a class or anything like that. But I was okay. An okay student, I would say.

So you didn't like the structure of it? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, I was a student that will get easily distracted.

So maybe there was not enough interactivity, as it were. Yeah, maybe. You had to answer this a lot. So born in southern Italy, but now you're teaching Spanish in Iowa City. What was the path that led you to where you are right now?

So I studied in Italy up until my undergraduate degree. During my last semester of my undergraduate degree, I came to the US. As an exchange student for one semester in Birmingham, Alabama. While there, I met my wife. She was just my girlfriend, and so went back to Italy. And then after one year, I came back to the US. And I started a master's degree at the University of Alabama. Two years later, I started my PhD.

Three years later, I got a job at the University of Iowa, and I've been here for five years at Iowa.

What was it like to land in Birmingham, Alabama? That was very much different from Cognano Verano.

Yeah, it was a totally different world. I come from a small town. Then I studied in Italy, in Pescara. That is a big town, but very walk ball. And then Birmingham, Alabama. It's totally different. We were at downtown. We had to get the taxi to even go grocery shopping because there was nothing around there.

So totally different experience, but I liked it.

Can you get good Italian food?

There some, yeah. That's the problem of the US. Yes, italian food, it's hard.

They probably think they know what Italian food is. Right, but enough of that. So you're running the languages program at the university there, is that right?

Yeah, I'm running the Spanish basic program. So the first four semester of Spanish, we have a pretty big Spanish program with around 801,000 students per semester, I would say between 25 and 30 instructors, including Tas and faculty. My goal for this program right now is fully switch every single level to OER textbooks.

Nice.

We started three years and a half ago, instead of starting from the first level, I decided to start from the fourth level. Just like the specific classes for profession like healthcare and education. And we did that and that's working really well. And now I have two projects going on at the same time to fully cover the whole program. One is creating an elementary one into Spanish textbook and I'm doing this with a team of four people total, some from the University of Iowa, and then there is another professor from University of Northern Iowa. And so this is going on. We are about to be done with the first semester of the book and we will keep working on the second semester. And then the second project for intermediate one and two is to have a team of people working on this community textbook.

So there are going to be for the intermediate two that we're actively working on, there are going to be around twelve orders from around the country and each one we write a very small part of the textbook. But I think it's going to be great because we're going to get all those voices, all those different perspectives, they're all going to follow the same model. But then we're going to have a pleurality of voices and that's going to be great.

Many voices. That is our theme here. What are some of the challenges of teaching languages and OER? Or maybe what are the opportunities at the same time? Because you've taken this on fully, so.

There are many opportunities. First of all, you are not restricted to what the traditional publishers are offering. For example, when we started using the first textbook there were some mistakes. And there are always mistakes in textbook either if it's OER, if it's like a traditional publisher textbook. But the good thing about OER that you find a mistake, another professor find a mistake, you can fix it right away. You don't have to wait a second edition of the book coming in three years. Another opportunity for OER is that it can be localized to your own student, to the students needs of your town, of your areas. We created the textbook for healthcare, the textbook for education.

We interviewed people around our communities. We got like experience of a dual language school. We interviewed doctor nurses and they are like related to the students, to our students population. Let's say that you want to use the same textbook in Canada. You can use the textbook but you can adapt it. Like we are using a picture of a CD around here. You can just change it and slightly change your story and talk about your community. So the type of students you have can relate to that.

Right now there are also issues. The main one is the lack of support. So for example, when you have a traditional public share, they provide you platform where your students can do homework. There are plenty of activities already made when you're using OER. This is lucky. Right now, what we are doing is trying to do everything in the LMS. Plus we had to integrate some homework in like pen and paper so there is additional work for our students. I'm trying to work on a solution for that too, but for now, it's still like ongoing.

Students are not paying any money, so they are way more understanding and accepting what's going on. Every time we get evaluation for my program, students are always like when there is a traditional publisher platform, no matter how well it works, they will be complaining because they are paying hundreds of dollars every semester and they can be like, oh no, this platform is horrible. But when we are using OER textbooks, students are always super understanding and they appreciate the effort we put to create this material and give it to them for free.

With your experience now in creating these OER textbooks, what are some strategies in developing that make them effective in terms of the design? Because I can see approaching it from the healthcare field, there's obviously specific needs for healthcare professionals to understand Spanish, but in terms of what works really well for learning or creating activities or lessons within these kind of textbooks.

So we had two way approach. One was we interviewed various stakeholders before creating the textbook. For education professional, we sent a survey to 20 education professionals like superintendents, professor, teachers, kidwell teachers, asking them what were the needs for new teachers coming into the profession. We took that into account for all our textbook. We've been using a backward design so we find out about the learning objectives before we even start writing. We let the needs of our classrooms, the needs of our students, and the needs of the professions dictate what we're going to include in our textbooks. Then for the elementary one, we also interviewed our students. So we run a study.

We had around 300 students replying to us asking them about teams, topics, what do they want us to include in our textbook? We wanted to use their voices and help create a textbook that is not just, oh yeah, professors are going to like it, but we wanted our students to like it. So we interviewed them and we did a lot of research on order of learning for Spanish water students learning first? What are students learning after we use all this data that we grab from research to dictate the order of the grammar topics in our textbook.

I saw in the textbook for education professionals that you used a lot of H five P activities. What makes that effective or how is that used within your OER textbooks?

I really like H five P activities, but we started relying less and less on them because there are some issues with them. One thing is we use them as a self assessment tool for students. Sometimes we tell the students, hey, read and then when you're like, doing those activities in the classroom, you don't have to go over the activity to double check with the students. The students get an answer right away. Now, relying Avly on HVP activities, when you export the PDF or export the text, they do not export well, or you just get the links. We are actually working on creating a text version of the textbook that can be printed from some students. There are also some issue for students with disability and accessibility of those HVP activities. In the education textbook, we use more than 200 HVP activities, and then on the new ones, we're using less and less just to make the textbook more accessible to everyone.

If you're using Apple Computer and you're using Safari, they're not going to be opening on them. So you have to warn your students, hey, you need to use Google Chrome or a different browser.

That's the thing. It looks very compelling when you see HVIP, and then you realize some of these issues. I have colleagues at BC campus that are working with Pressbooks to try to address this situation to make something. When you get a PDF to say, go online to see this, that really isn't a good substitute. Good point about that. I've also seen in some of your projects that you're doing some things with virtual reality or you're trying to do some new development there. Can you talk about that?

That was like my main field of research. I did my dissertation of virtual reality. I actually created a data app in virtual reality using Google Cardboard. VR, an old system that doesn't exist anymore. What they wanted to do was train students before they were going abroad to immerse them in the new world where they were going surrounded by the language they were not used to hear all the time, just to reduce the cultural shock that they will encounter when they would be there. Students used to study abroad for a semester or two in the past, and now those numbers are going down and they are usually starting for three weeks or four weeks. The idea was to have them fully be immersed once there since day one, instead of having this culture shock and this waste of the first week, just to realize, oh, everyone around me speaking Spanish. That was the purpose of the training.

Lately, we have been working on just one additional project about VR. There is one colleague of mine that is teaching Spanish, medical interpreting. We've been recording a series of 360 videos of medical encounters. There is a patient, there is a medical provider, can be a doctor, a nurse, medical assistant, any of them, and then an interpreter. So we record the situations with actors, and then we put them on YouTube as 360 videos, and we use them in various way. We mute when the interpreter is talking, so the students can use them as Proudies. And we also use them as an assessment at the end of the semester. So students, they get either in the VR or if they have issue with VR, they can just watch it on YouTube and they have to interpret what's going on while the video is playing.

So are you a big fan of Meta?

I'm not a big fan. They are the one that they're bringing VR to everyone. You get a noculosquest one or two. They are incredible. They are super cheap. For my program with the center for Language, Culture and Learning, we got the grant and we got eight. Then I got another grant for Meta and I got another twelve ad set. They're very portable, you can bring them everywhere.

The quality is amazing. They've been helping us a lot to bring VR into the classroom.

And then I was thinking about just a couple of years, all the excitement about Google Glass and the fact that you had this immersed in the world and that kind of went down. You see these exciting technologies and after a while do you start to say, wow, I don't know if I really want to jump into that. How do you pick and choose? How do you decide to invest some energy into a new direction?

It's usually based on what I'm teaching, what we are teaching. What are the needs? So, for example, this project about VR that I was talking about, the medical encounters, it started out on necessity due to COVID. All the hospitals, all the mobile clinics, they stopped accepting students of this class to go in the clinic and watch people interpreting or help interpreting. There was the need of training these students and they couldn't go to their hospital. So it was either like, oh yeah, we pretend that we do it in the class between students and the professor, or we create this experience that let them immerse. They can do it at all. They can come to our lab, grab a headset, and practice for a day or two. So it made it closer to the real life experience without the risk, because we are reducing golden age.

When you are interpreting and there is a real patient, you might get in a situation that can be embarrassing. And we're talking about 18 years old students that might not have the competence to deal with that situation for the first time. So having them experience it before and then try it again in real life, it's really helpful.

I'm really intrigued. I like this approach that you've taken to adjust in the context of different professional fields, education and healthcare. Are there other professions that maybe you might bring Spanish to in the future?

I know that one of my colleagues, she's going to try to work on a textbook for Spanish for business, so she's going to work on this. We have to think that Spanish is basically the second language of the US. There are 60 million speakers of Spanish I think 20 million of Spanish speakers in the US do not speak English. So there is this need for Americans to be bilingual because it's a growing language. So many people speak Spanish. Having students that come out of a university and they can speak Spanish, they can understand Spanish, they get this superpower, they get this ability to communicate with everyone. I think in business it's very useful. I know that there is a need in the courtrooms.

Healthcare and education are the one that needs it the most for now.

I know from conversations I had with another Spanish instructor the idea of working with heritage language speakers. The Spanish that people like me are used to is like Spanish for tourists and people who didn't grow up speaking Spanish. Do you have any work that you do in that area?

It's not my field, but I've been collaborating with various people that do Spanish for heritage speakers. I've been teaching Spanish so I had students that were heritage figure of Spanish there are heritage speakers that they grew up speaking Spanish and their Spanish is perfect. Then there are other Spanish speakers that they grew up hearing Spanish but they were not speaking Spanish. Their pronunciation is amazing, but then they cannot say much and there is a lot of in between. So there is a lot of need for Spanish heritage speakers. We usually teach a few courses each semester dedicated to them because Spanish heritage speakers they didn't receive any formal education in Spanish. So they are amazing at speaking. But the writing part if you grew up in Mexico, you went to school for 2015 years learning Spanish not only auto told, but also writing all the grammar rules, everything.

Those speakers grew up in the US, went to school learning English and they lack formal education in Spanish. Their needs compared to English speaker students are totally different.

I sometimes ask people because you speak Italian in Spanish, what language is your brain working? Do you recognize? How do your thoughts come out?

It depends on the situation. If I'm talking about language acquisition, language teaching, that's my field of expertise. I study most of that in the US. So I think about that in English. So there are colleagues of mine that we speak with each other in Spanish all the time and then there are other people that we just speak in English all the time. And I don't know why, but it's just like with some people we're more comfortable speaking with each other in English order in Spanish, other in Italian so I have a daughter, she's nine months old. I speak where in Italian all the time, but then with my wife I speak in English. I think it's based on the situation.

My brain switch from one language to another.

That's fantastic, the way you describe it. It's how you live, you move between them all. You spoke about getting the award, what does this mean for you to get this recognition?

It's pretty rewarding because it's a big award, an international award recognizes what I've been doing, what I've been working on in the last five years. We have been working a lot at my university with other colleagues to make OER work recognized for promotion, being recognized at an academic level at this current time, it's not fully recognized. And this is not fair because everyone can publish a textbook with a publisher, especially if you have a big program like mine, you have the numbers for the publisher to be interested in your program. It's not that the quality of traditional textbook is higher than OER. For every textbook we've been writing, we've been going through a very hard peer review process for the education textbook. I think we got twelve peer reviewers, other faculty of Spanish from other universities that have been reviewing our textbook, we have been fixing it based on those reviews. For the healthcare one, it's available online. There are some mistakes because we are still going through the peer review process.

So we got in twelve Spanish faculty and we are also asking seven or eight medical professionals to review. We are not experts in healthcare, so there are things related to healthcare and we want medical professionals to review those things. The quality of the OER works that has been produced in the US. It's so high and it should be recognized. So receiving an award, recognize the work I've been doing and all the effort we've been doing, we got some ground, so we got some money to develop Oya project, but you are not getting paid, right? And so it's a good recognition.

I'm curious because Giovanni, you're known for being an OER advocate. Do you ever hear from publishers? Do they try to make a case.

To you like, this is great stuff.

You'Re doing with OER, but let me tell you about what we have over here. Do you think they're going to change their game? How do publishers proceed forward in this kind of environment?

I don't know. I think the publishers, they don't want to change. They are stuck in their old way of doing things. They also do not have any interest on changing. So adopting OER right now, it's very hard. It's not an easy thing because we are all relying on using a learning platform, using homework, creating a textbook, or like even adopting an Oyad textbook right now, it's hard. It's not the easiest thing to do from the professor standpoint. You need to put a lot of efforts if you want to adopt Oyad, if you want to use a traditional publisher, it's just like a con away.

They will come, they will bring you to dinner, they will show you what they have, and then they have a lot of customer service, customer support, everything is ready for you. So from a time consuming thing like adopting OER, it's the hard room using a traditional textbook, it's super easy.

So in terms of working with faculty who are maybe new to adopting OER, how do you go about not just making a case for it, but getting them over? The possible hump of this looking like a lot of work. What's effective in working with faculty?

Every time I talk with fidelity, I show them data. I show them what this research has been showing. Right now, we are trying to run a research in my university with the librarian and another faculty on student satisfaction. What's happening to students using OER textbook? And we try to do it for all the subjects, all the courses that are using OER, so that we have even more data to show faculty that, hey, if you use OER, there are a lot of benefits. There are benefits from using OER. For example, students have access to the textbook from day one. They don't have to wait until when they can actually buy it or when they're financially clear. So some students are waiting until two or three weeks before they can buy a textbook that's going to affect their grade, that's going to affect the way they learn, because the first two or three weeks of plus are basically useless for them because they cannot read the book.

The most affected people are going to be the students that don't have money to buy them. If you're a rich kid spending $300 for a textbook, and those are like real prices, it's okay, you're not going to pay it, you're not going to be affected by it. You're still going to be able to go to a restaurant and eat. But for someone that doesn't have the money or the resources, that's going to be really impactful for them when they have a free textbook instead of a textbook that is so expensive.

Obviously, you're very passionate about this work. You're very busy. You already told me you're a new dad, and I saw a dog in the background. What's your balance? What do you do outside of work to get calm or just to relax?

I like to go to the gym. I like to bike. So those are things that relax me. Lately, I've been working a lot. Being a new dad, that's taking a lot of time. My work, it's taking a lot of time. So I've not been doing much to roll, actually.

That's okay. I'm going to extra appreciate you taking time now during this busy time, end of the year and going into the holidays to share the work that you're doing.

I'm trying to do another project that I hope is going to benefit OER. We are starting up another problem. OER, for me was that the adapting part, the learning platform, they do not exist, or the one that exists or the one created by universities are not good enough. This is like a site project of mine. I'm trying to create an OER platform where you can use books and adapt multiple books like Lego Block, so that you can grab one part of a book, one part of another book, and put them together and do all the homework and interactive activities in the platform. So that's like another side project. I'm currently doing a side project on.

The side project of all the other ones. We'd love to keep in touch with you and hear how that comes out. Plan a seed if you don't know, but our conference next year is going to be up in Edmonton, which is north of you, not quite overseas. It was in France this year, but we would love you to share your work there.

When is the conference up there?

It's mid October, 16 to 18th. You'll hear about it from us.

I will try to come for sure.

It's been great to have this conversation with you and hear about your work and congratulations again on these achievements and all the work that you're doing. For folks listening, we're going to be featuring all the individual award winners like Giovanni. Just give you a chance to hear this conversation and maybe come back with some questions or comments. We'll give you all the links where you can find more about Giovanni's work and lots of textbooks to explore. And you'll find this podcast at our site, voices oeglobal.org. We hope you stick around and join our conversations in Oegconnect. And when I get around to editing this, I will insert some music from the free Music archive, which I always turn to because it's all Creative Commons license. I don't randomly pick a track, so I found a Spanish flavor track called La Paloma de la Paz.

So the Dove of Peace, some good music in the background, and we'll see if Giovanni approves of my music choice. It's been great to meet you, Giovanni, and I appreciate you taking the time today to talk about your work.

Thank you for the opportunity. (music outro)