OEG Voices 056: OE Award Winner Giovanni Zimotti
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Giovanni Zimotti: [Quote] "We have a pretty big Spanish program with around 800, 1000 students per semester and my goal for this program right now is to fully switch every single level to OER textbooks"

Multiple Voices Intro: Hello and welcome to OEG Voices, a podcast bringing to you the voices and ideas of open educators from around the world. OEG Voices is produced by Open Education Global, a member-based, non-profit organization supporting the development and use of open education globally. Learn more about us at oeglobal.org.

There’s much to take in at a global level. We hope to bring you closer to how open education is working by hearing the stories of practitioners, told in their own voices. Each episode introduces you to a global open educator and we invite you to later engage in conversation with them in our OEG Connect community.

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

Giovanni Zimotti: I'm in Iowa City. 

Alan Levine: Iowa City. Fantastic. Well, welcome to this show. Like I said, we do this very informally, but we wanna talk a lot about your work in OER, but especially calling out your receiving of the OE Awards for Excellence in the Educator category.

How'd it feel to get that award? What was your . Reaction?

Giovanni Zimotti: It was unexpected. I, I was really happy to receive this award. I recognize 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. I 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 values the university's trying to create, resources for students, assessment for various topics. I was in the third cohort or the second cohort. They were trying to develop this platform where they will keep all the question banks for various subjects.

Me and six or seven other Spanish professors worked on creating question 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 OER world. 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 professional. 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 gonna write our own textbook. We are not gonna deal with traditional publishers.

We're just gonna like, do it in OER save a lot of money for our students. And then from that textbook, it all started and I had been involved into OER since then.

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

Giovanni Zimotti: Yes, so I grew up in Cagnano Varano.

So 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 mile radius.

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

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

Alan Levine: So you didn't like the structure of it, is that what you're saying? 

Giovanni Zimotti: I was a student that will get easily distracted.

Alan Levine: So maybe there was not enough interactivity as it were.

Giovanni Zimotti: Yeah.

Alan Levine: Maybe you've 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?

Giovanni Zimotti: So I, 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 I went back to Italy and then after one year I came back to the US and I started a master 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.

Alan Levine: What, what was it like to land in Birmingham, Alabama? That was very much different from Cagnano Varano.

Giovanni Zimotti: Yeah, it was a totally different world. It's, you know, like I come from a small town, then I studied in, Italy in Pescara. That is a big town, but very walkable. And then Birmingham, Alabama, it's totally different. We were downtown. We had to get a taxi to even go grocery shopping because there was nothing around there.

So, Totally different experience, but I liked it.

Alan Levine: Can you get good Italian food there?

Giovanni Zimotti: Uh, some,

Alan Levine: Some, yeah.

Giovanni Zimotti: That's the problem of the US.

Alan Levine: Yes.

Giovanni Zimotti: Italian food. It's hard.

Alan Levine: 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?

Giovanni Zimotti: I'm running the Spanish Basic program, so the first fourth semester of Spanish. We have a pretty big Spanish program with around 800, 1000 students per semester. I would say between 25 and 30 instructors, including TAs and faculty, and my goal for this program right now is to fully switch every single level to OER textbooks.

Alan Levine: Nice.

Giovanni Zimotti: We started three years and half ago. Instead of starting from the first level, I decided to start from the fourth level. Just like the specific classes for professions 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 convert the whole program.

One is creating an Elementary One and Two 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 the 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 cumulative textbook. So there are gonna be, for the intermediate two that we're actively working on, there are gonna be around 12 others from around the country and each one will write a very small part of the textbook.

But I think it's gonna be great because we're gonna get all those voices, all those different perspectives they're all gonna follow the same model. But then we're gonna have a like a pluarity of voices and that's gonna be great.

Alan Levine: 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.

Giovanni Zimotti: 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, always mistakes in textbook. Either if it's OER or 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 for 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 area.

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 doctors, 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're using a picture of a city around there., You can just change it and change slightly, change the story and talk about your community. So the type of students you have can relate to them.

Alan Levine: Right.

Giovanni Zimotti: Now there are also issues. The main one is the lack of support.

So for example, when you have a traditional publisher, they provide you a platform where you students can do homework. There are plenty of activities already made. When you're using OER, this is lacking. 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 and 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're way more understanding and accepting what's going on. Every time we get the student 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're paying hundreds of dollars every semester and they can be like, "Oh no, this platform is horrible bad."

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.

Alan Levine: 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.

Giovanni Zimotti: So , we had a two-way approach. One was we interviewed value stakeholders. Before creating the textbook for education professionals, we sent a survey to, I think, 20 educational professionals, like superintendents, professor, teachers, K12 teachers, asking them what were the needs for new teachers coming into the profession.

We took that into account. For all our textbooks, we've been using a backward design, so we find out about the landing 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 gonna 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 to us to include in our textbook? We wanted to hear their voices and help create a textbook that is not just, "Oh yeah, professors are gonna 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. What are students learning first? What are students learning after? We used all this data that we grabbed from research to dictate the order of the grammar topics in our textbook.

Alan Levine: I saw in the textbook for Educational Professionals that you used a lot of H5P activities. What makes that effective or how is that used within your OER textbooks?

Giovanni Zimotti: I really like H5P 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 on H5P activities, when you export a PDF or export a text , they do not export well or you just get a link. We are actually working on creating a text version of the textbook that can be printed for some students.

There are also some issue for students with disability and accessibility of those H5P activities. In the education textbook, we use more than 200 H5P activities. And then on the new ones we are using less and less, just to make the textbook more accessible to everyone.

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

Alan Levine: That's the thing. It looks very compelling when you see H5P and then you realize some of these issues. I have colleagues at BCcampus 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?

Giovanni Zimotti: That was like my main field of research. I did my dissertation on virtual reality. I actually created a beta app in virtual reality using Google Cardboard VR, an old system that doesn't exist anymore. What I 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 will be there. 

Students used to study abroad for a semester or two in the past and now those numbers are going down and they're usually studying for three weeks or four weeks. The idea was to have them fully be immersed once there, since day one, instead of having this like 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. It's 360 videos and we use them in various way. We mute when the interpreter is talking, so the students can use them as practice . 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's playing.

Alan Levine: So, are you a big fan of Meta?

Giovanni Zimotti: I'm not a big fan, but they are the one that they're bringing VR to everyone. If you get a Oculus Quest One or Two, they're incredible. They're super cheap. For my program with the Center for Language Culture and Learning, we got a grant and we got eight. Then I got another grant for MEA and I got another 12 headsets.

They're very portable. You can bring them everywhere. The quality's amazing. They've been helping us a lot to bring VR into the classroom.

Alan Levine: And then I was thinking about just a couple years, all the excitement about Google Glass, 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 wanna jump into that.

How do you pick and choose? How do you decide, to invest some energy into a new direction?

Giovanni Zimotti: 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, this 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 the hospital. So it was either like, oh yeah, we pretend and we do it with in the class between students or the professor, or we create this experience that lets them immerse, they can do it at home. They can come to our lab, grab a headset and practice for a day or two. 

So it made it like closer to the real life experience without the risk because we are reducing all the risk. When you're interpreting and there is a real patient, you might get in a situation that can be embarrassing, and we're talking about 18 year 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.

Alan Levine: 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?

Giovanni Zimotti: I know that one of my colleague here, she's gonna try to work on a textbook for Spanish for business , so she's gonna 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.

Alan Levine: I know from conversations I had with another Spanish instructor, the idea of working with a heritage language speaker. 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 ? 

Giovanni Zimotti: 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 speaker 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 needs. 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 20, 15 years learning Spanish, not only how to talk, 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.

Alan Levine: I sometimes ask people cause you speak Italian and Spanish, what language does your brain work in? Do you recognize that? How do your thoughts come out?

Giovanni Zimotti: It depends on the situation. If I'm talking about language acquisition, language teaching, that's my field or expertise. I studied 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, other in Spanish, other in Italian.

So I have a daughter, she's nine months old. speak to her 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.

Alan Levine: 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, to get this recognition? 

Giovanni Zimotti: It's very rewarding because it's a big award, an international award. It recognizes what I've been doing, what I've been working on my last five years. We have been working a lot in my university with other colleague 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 a 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 12 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, I think 12 Spanish faculty and we are also asking seven or eight medical professional 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 recognizes the work I've been doing and all the effort we've been doing. We got some grants, so we got some money to develop OER projects, but you're not getting paid.

Alan Levine: Right.

Giovanni Zimotti: And so it's a good recognition .

Alan Levine: And 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 gonna change their game?

How do publishers proceed forward in this kind of environment?

Giovanni Zimotti: 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 OER 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 effort if you want adopt OER. If you want to use a traditional publisher, it just like a call 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 gets ready for you. 

So from a time consuming thing like adopting OER, it's the hard route. Using a traditional textbook, it's super easy.

Alan Levine: So in terms of working with faculty who were maybe new to adopting OER. How do you go about , not just making a case for it, but getting 'em over the possible hump of this looking like a lot of work.

What's effective in working with faculty?

Giovanni Zimotti: Every time I talk with faculty, I show them data. I show them what's this research has been showing. Right now we are trying to run research 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 gonna affect their grade. That's gonna affect the way they learn because the first two or three weeks or plus are basically useless for them because they cannot read the book. The most affected people are gonna 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 gonna pay it, you're not gonna be affected by it. You're still gonna be able to go to a restaurant and eat.

But for someone that doesn't have the money or the resources, that's gonna be really impactful for them when they have a free textbook instead of a textbook that is so expensive.

Alan Levine: 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?

Giovanni Zimotti: 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 relax lately.

Alan Levine: That's okay. I'm gonna 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. 

Giovanni Zimotti: I'm trying to do another project that I hope it's gonna benefit OER. We are starting up. Another problem of 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 side 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 site project I'm currently doing.

Alan Levine: 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 , plant a seed if you don't know. But, our conference next year is gonna be up in Edmonton, which is north of you. Not quite overseas, you know, it was in France this year but ,we would love you to share your work there.

Giovanni Zimotti: When is the conference happening?

Alan Levine: It's mid-October 16th to 18th. You'll hear about it from us.

Giovanni Zimotti: I will try to come for sure.

Alan Levine: 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 gonna be featuring all the individual award winners like Giovanni, to give you a chance to hear this conversation and maybe, come back with some questions or comments. We will give you all the links where you can find more about Giovanni's work and lots of textbooks to explore.

You'll find this podcast at our site voices dot oeglobal dot org. We hope you stick around and join our conversations in OEG Connect. And when I get around to editing in this, I will, insert some music from the Free Music Archive, which I always turn to because it's all Creative Commons licensed.

I don't randomly pick a track, so I found a Spanish flavor track called la Paloma de la Paz, the dove of peace. Some good music in the background and we'll see if Giovanni approves my music choice. 

It's been great to meet you Giovanni, and I appreciate you taking the time today to talk about your work.

Giovanni Zimotti: Thank you for your opportunity.