Willkommen: Deutsch für alle & Willkommen: Deutsch für alle 2

Willkommen: Deutsch für alle (WDfa) and Willkommen: Deutsch für alle 2 (WDfa2) are open educational resources (OER) for the first- and second-year sequences of college-level German instruction in North America. Currently adopted at institutions ranging from large public universities to small liberal arts colleges, these OER offer a task-based, blended, and inclusive approach. Born digital, WDfa and WDfa2 present a suite of resources: multimedia in-class vocabulary presentations and activities, downloadable PDFs for students to print for in-class, small-group work (e.g., information gaps, interviews), HTML5-driven homework providing instant feedback to students, Moodle quizzes, and student tasks for each unit, as well as accompanying rubrics. WDfa garnered the 2021 “Access to Language Education Award” from CALICO, lernu.net, and the Esperantic Studies Foundation. The materials cohere well, making adoption easy. WDfa and WDfa2 are broken into 10 Einheiten (units) each. Each Einheit opens with learning outcomes aligned with the Common European Framework of References for Languages Can-Do Statements, with WDfa covering A1 and A2 levels and WDfa2 covering B1.1 and B1.2. Odd-numbered webpages are intended for in-class days on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule for WDfa; while even-numbered webpages serve as remote learning days on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends. WDfa2 provides materials for two longer in-class sessions alternating with online days. Moodle quizzes assess material covered in class and on the even-numbered homework web pages. Each Einheit features a relevant task developed over multiple days and varying in format (e.g., written and oral, group work and solo work, short presentations). Both WDfa and WDfa2 have one unit each dedicated to a graded reader by Angelika Bohn. The site is intuitive and easy to navigate. Knox College adopted WDfa for our first-year sequence in fall 2021, and we have experienced no issues with Internet outages or other technical challenges with the website. Students have indicated that they find the website intuitive and user-friendly. Knox's adoption of WDfa and my occasional use of WDfa2 Einheiten to support 200-level courses have gone very smoothly. Knox College teaches our first-year sequence daily; adapting WDfa to our schedule has been easy. The website functions much like a well-prepared PowerPoint deck for each day, allowing instructors to move seamlessly from vocabulary introduction to short audio or video clips to small group work. Occasionally, students need a device to access a website for an in-class task, but generally students do not need a screen in front of them. I often find myself taking a small group activity and refining it to either gamify the task or to make the task a bit clearer for students; however, even in these instances, WDfa offers a great starting point. Some webpages for in-class work feature longer texts and dialogues, which Knox has opted to add to the PDF students print, allowing them to read on paper and markup the text as needed. While Knox College has not used WDfa or WDfa2 in this fashion, I can imagine these would lend themselves to synchronous remote teaching situations; however, fully asynchronous remote courses would require a significant amount of work by the instructor to replicate the in-class experience for students. WDfa and WDfa2 incorporate technology and online tools to enhance the student experience. Each homework day has one or more Quizlet decks to review vocabulary. In addition to digital flashcards, the test function in Quizlet (subscription required) is an excellent way for students to practice. Similarly, relevant lessons from the Deutsche Welle series Nicos Weg or the vocabulary builder Deutschtrainer are often included as optional enrichment in WDfa. As students progress to WDfa2, supplements trend toward Easy German, Deutsche Welle's Deutschlandlabor series, and other level-appropriate videos. WDfa covers the communicative skills appropriate for introductory courses: one's daily routine, family and friends, celebrations, travel, and more. However, it does so in a manner that reflects real-world situations and conversations very well, utilizing various media. One example in WDfa is “Getting to Know a City.” Instead of using a nameless, generic city to introduce giving directions and typical tourist activities, the chapter is a deep dive into Kassel (the site of the Canadian Summer School in Germany program). The heartbeat of the unit is the Dokumenta art festival, public parks such as Wilhelmshöhe, and museums and palaces in the city. The task then directs students to research and present on other cities in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. Such real cultural content driving the acquisition of language skills is the norm for these OER, though it should be noted that, while Austria and Switzerland are thematized from time to time, a focus on Germany dominates here, as with most introductory materials. WDfa2 covers more advanced cultural topics, ranging from celebrations and holidays to music, fairy tales, and divided Germany. Again, the units are well-thought-out and engaging. Subtle shifts are evident, including more flipped classroom work (students learning vocabulary via interactive exercises as homework) and readings. Short cultural topics are covered regularly in English on the homework pages, appearing in purple boxes. In both WDfa and WDfa2, grammar is covered inductively during in-class work, leaving more explicit, English-language explanations on homework webpages. These are well organized, with grammar explanations set off in orange-colored boxes, followed by self-grading exercises for student practice before their Moodle quizzes. Some units include viewable and downloadable PDFs to cover grammar topics in greater depth. WDfa and WDfa2 live up to their promulgated goal of inclusivity as they include a broad range of identities from the outset, such as Black, Indigenous, and Other People of Color who are not labeled as recent arrivals in Europe, queer identities in family trees, and native and non-native speakers in videos as models for students. Most importantly, their presence is not limited to units focusing on others or outsider identities. Some challenges have presented themselves. If one's campus or school does not use Moodle, one cannot incorporate the daily quizzes. I find Moodle frustrating to use. While Moodle offers great flexibility in setting exact days and timeframes for students to take the quizzes, it is less intuitive to navigate to those settings, and even small tasks seem to require many more clicks through more pages than other LMS platforms do. Ideally, I would like to see the adoption of an alternative to Moodle for daily quizzes. Similarly, I have found that my students have needed additional support and scaffolding for the tasks. It may be wise to incorporate time in class to workshop and explicitly direct students to revisit relevant previous in-class small group and homework exercises for model sentences to manipulate. I have students brainstorm the vocabulary and language structures they will need to complete the task, then review the Einheit to find exercises that align well with those needs. Students are encouraged to identify good model sentences and use them to flesh out their own dialogue, presentation, or writing. WDfa and WDfa2 are well-conceived and provide instructors with a born-digital, multimedia, task-based, and well-articulated OER. As with all resources, some supplementation and adaptation are necessary, but instructors will find WDfa and WDfa2 easy to adopt. Substantive supplementation is not required, allowing instructors to utilize suggested resources or to add their own graded readers, films, or games. If nothing else, WDfa and WDfa2 provide an invaluable resource for supplementation, and instructors can always utilize individual units to support their existing courses. Todd Heidt is a professor of German at Knox College, where he teaches all levels from introductory courses through senior capstones. He has published on the media and culture of the Weimar Republic. Recently, he has focused on pedagogy and curricular development, including co-publishing a cultural history for German learners, Ekstase und Elend (with Claudia Kost and Emre Sencer).

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