Practical Usage of OER Material in the EFL Classroom

Introduction

Despite the fact that Open Educational Resources (OER) movement have been around for 15 years, little attention has been paid with regards to practical usage in secondary education. Instead the focus has been on tertiary education as well as education for developing countries. Open Educational Resources allow teachers to adapt teaching material in order to suit the needs of their students. Rather than having to worry about copyright related issues, more time can be spent on creating quality material.

As a student of teacher training, the author had a personal interest in determining how useful OER material can be applied in a subject such as English as a Foreign Language (EFL) where school book are said to be the primary material used. (Neumann 2015, as cited in Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens and Books on Demand GmbH 2015, p.36) Therefore, a study was conducted in an Austrian middle school with students in their second year of English study. Over the course of two weeks students were taught using OER material only.

During the study influencing factors, such as time needed to create the material, complexity of licensing as well as student's age and feedback, were evaluated. The findings of this study are discussed in the following thesis.

First of all, a general definition and overview of the most important terms related to the study will be provided. Afterwards two studies conducted prior to the main study will be discussed due to there relevance to the topic at hand. Later, the methodology and evaluation will be presented. What follows is a detailed description of the lessons taught, as well as a discussion of the findings. The thesis concludes with a chapter regarding the limitations of the study and suggestions for future research.

EFL (English as a

Foreign Language)

There are a variety of reasons why EFL was chosen as the topic of the following study about Open Educational Resources. The following chapter is based on information provided by LinguaServe Germany (2016).

First, it is important to define what EFL means. EFL stands for English as a Foreign Language and is closely related to the term ESL or English as a Second Language. However, there are a few distinct differences that need to be considered. The main difference between these two terms is related to the country in which English is being taught. If English is taught in a country, such as Austria, in which English is not the main language, the subject is called EFL. Whereas if English is taught to non-native speakers in an English speaking country it is considered to be ESL.

In addition to that there is another difference that has to do with the particular learning setting. In EFL classes, students are mostly native speakers of the same language. Furthermore, the teacher is usually also a native speaker of the same language. This makes communication easier because problems encountered with English can be explained in the common native language. This is not the case in ESL classes. An ESL class typically consists of learners from different countries with different mother tongues. In addition to that the teacher instructing an ESL class is usually a native English speaker. This means that students and teacher do not share a common language. Therefore, they need to rely on English as a langua franca in order to communicate. A langua franca refers to a language that is used to talk about the language used by speakers of various mother tongues in order to communicate with each other. ("Lingua franca -Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" 2016)

Knowing about these differences is important when developing OER material for English learners. However, despite the fact that the OER material used during the study was used in an EFL context, ESL material was included as well. The reason for this is that first of all it could not always be determined whether the material was EFL or ESL. Secondly, since OER material is predominantly produced in English and a large amount of material is produced in English speaking countries such as the US and the UK therefore it would have been impractical to exclude ESL material.

While some material and teaching techniques need to be adapted based on whether the students are EFL or ESL students, the material itself can nevertheless be useful to students. Therefore, for simplicity purposes the thesis will refer to the material as EFL material despite the fact that the more appropriate term would be EFL/ESL material.

Creative Commons

In 2001 the non-profit organization Creative Commons (CC) was founded. (CC 2016) The organization is part of the copyleft movement (Copyleft 2016) and allows users to license their work under a license that is not "all rights reserved". This means that licensers allow licensees certain rights to their work that is usually not granted through copyright regulations. The most recent CC license suite i.e. 4.0 was released in November 2013.

("CC's Next Generation Licenses -Welcome Version 4.0!" 2013)

It should be noted, that Creative Commons licenses do not work against copyright but work together with it and can be seen as an extension of it. (Kreutzer 2013;Klimpel 2012) Currently users are able to license their works under one of six licenses as well as a special public domain license. What all of these have in common is that they are "open" to various degrees. That is to say that on the most basic level, material licensed under a CC license is allowed to be freely shared with others without regulations as long as credit to the original source is provided. All together there are four different "modules" that can make up a Creative Commons license. These modules will be explained in more detail below. (Licensing information taken from: (CC-Licenses 2016))

• BY (attribute) This means that when using the resource the author of the source file needs to be credited • NC (non commercial) The material cannot be used for commercial purposes. • ND (non derivational) The material has to be used "as is"

and cannot be modified. • SA (share alike) When material licensed under a Share-Alike license is used in parts or as a whole to create new material, the resulting material needs to be licensed under the same license as the original source.

As stated above these modules make up the currently available Creative Commons licenses which can be seen in Figure 1. In addition to the six licenses consisting of the above mentioned components, another license called CC0 or "no rights reserved" ("About CC0 -"No Rights Reserved" -Creative Commons -Creative Commons" 2016) is available. This license allows people to waive their copyright, something that is otherwise not always legally possible in every country. (CC-Public Domain 2016) Therefore, material released under a CC0 license can be used, redistributed and remixed freely by anyone without the need to credit the original source. However, crediting the source is considered to be good practice.

Furthermore, in addition to the CC0 license, the Creative Com-mons license provides users with a so called "public domain mark" that refers to "no known copyright". (CC-Public Domain 2016) This public domain mark can be used as an indication that material is part of the public domain, which allows said material to be found more easily. After a certain amount of years after the death of the last copyright holder, material becomes part of the public domain. This amount of time varies per country.

In Austria it is 70 years after the copyright holder's death that material becomes part of the public domain. (Thiele and Tax 2009) Similarly to the CC0 license material is then allowed to be freely used, remixed and redistributed.

Due to the fact that material that is part of the public domain in some countries might not neccesarily be in the public domain in others (CC-Public Domain 2016), no public domain material was used during the study.

One of the challenges associated with Creative Commons licenses is the issue of compatibility. Only six combinations of modules are possible, despite the fact that theoretically licenses such as NC ND would be possible as well. Not all of the currently valid licenses are able to be used along side each other.

License incompatibility is one of the major issues related to Creative Commons licenses. This is a problem particularly because CC has become a "defacto standard" for OER (Kreutzer 2013, p.7) and often times when people refer to OER they refer to material that is either licensed under a Creative Commons license or material that is in the public domain.

According to Kreutzer (2013), the fact that "commercial use" is legally difficult to define, can lead to problems with the NC module. Therefore, in order to ensure that no copyright infringement takes place, people might shy away from using material licensed under a NC license (Kreutzer 2013). Furthermore, by using an NC license, usage that might be intended and welcome by the original author is being prohibited. For example, material licensed under an NC license is not allowed to be used for in-firm training. (Kreutzer 2013) Similar results, i.e. material not being allowed to be used for commercial purposes, can be achieved by using the more open BY SA license. (Klimpel 2012) Therefore, users planing on licensing their material under an NC license should carefully consider if using a license with an NC module is necessary.

However, using the ShareAlike module can lead to problems as well. As seen in Figure 2 taken from (Kreutzer 2013, p. 51), after ND the SA module leads to some of the most compatibility issues.

A well known example of a SA problem occurred with regards to Wikipedia. Up until 2009 the Wikipedia website had been licensed under a GNU Free Documentation License ("GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 -GNU-Projekt -Free Software Foundation" 2016). This license is also a SA license. Therefore it was not possible to combine e.g. a picture under a CC SA license with an article found on Wikipedia. (Kreutzer 2013, p.52) In order to avoid such issues from happening again, a list of so called compatible licenses has been released which allows users to see which licenses are compatible with the CC BY SA and CC BY SA NC licenses. (CC-Compatiblelicenses 2016) An issue regarding the SA module and its incompatibilities was encountered during the study. More detail with regards to this issue will be given in a later chapter.

Despite these issues related to the SA module, BY and BY SA are seen to be the most open licenses. Throughout the study, close attention was paid in order to ensure that only material released under these two licenses was being used. With the exception of one audio file, which will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter, all other material used fit this criteria.

Furthermore, for the purpose of the study, new material created by adapting and remixing other material was released under a 4.0 version of either a BY or a BY SA license. In order to ensure uniform crediting the author decided to credit material as follows:

The only time this formatting was changed was with regards to the website "English Advantage" (Burns 2016) which provided material used in both the second and third lesson as can be seen in the appendix, as well as in the lesson chapters. The reason why the formatting was changed is because the web host explicitly states in his copyright notice that when sharing the material online a link back to the source website needs to be provided. The above mentioned formatting was based on the "best practice of attribution" ("Best practices for attribution -Creative Commons" 2016) established by the CC-foundation.

While the information provided on the website talks about TASL (title, author, source, license), the source link was omitted from the finished worksheet. This was possible to due to the fact that providing a URL to the source is not explicitly required except for material licensed under 4.0. However, according to the CC website for the 4.0 suite:

"a URI associated with the work is required as part of attribution if reasonably practicable to retain, regardless of whether it contains copyright notices or licensing information." ("License Versions -Creative Commons" 2016)

During the study, whenever possible, the real name of the author was used to give credit, however, where no real name could be found the username was used instead. ("How to attribute Creative Commons licensed materials | Creative Commons Australia" 2016) Furthermore, if the original author gave specific instructions with regards to how they wanted to be credited, those instructions were obeyed when crediting the used material.

The reason why the links were omitted was for cosmetic purposes because often times the links were too long and therefore appeared distracting in the final composition. Initially, it was considered to use a URL shortening tool such as TinyUrl ("TinyURL.com -shorten that long URL into a tiny URL" 2016) in order to work around this problem. However, due to possible expiration of the shortened URL or possible redirection to a different source it was decided against it. Instead, the links to the sources were included in the lesson plans. The lesson plans as well as the material used in class was sent to both of the English teachers at the end of the study.

Since the material was created for offline use it was established that the links to the source files were not relevant to the students themselves. However, using this method of distribution, the teachers as well as the students are nevertheless able to access the original source files.

Legal Situation in Austria

When discussing OER in the context of this study it is important to briefly talk about the legal situation in Austria. Open Educational Resources can be highly beneficial for Austrian teachers due to the current copyright laws instated. The reason for this is that while teachers are allowed to use copyrighted material in a classroom setting under particular circumstances, the same cannot be said for material specifically designed to be used for educational purposes. Therefore, if Austrian teachers want to reuse exercises and material they see in other school books for example, they are not allowed to do so. This means that OER material can be very beneficial to help fill this gap due to its particular nature, i.e. the fact that material is allowed to be freely reused, remixed and shared with others in order to create material of better quality that is suitable for students of a particular class.

Personality rights

In addition to learning about OER as a whole, students were also introduced to personality rights and in particular the "Recht am eigenen Bild" which translates to "right to one's own picture".

("RIS -Gesamte Rechtsvorschrift für Urheberrechtsgesetz -Bundesrecht konsolidiert, Fassung vom 17.02.2016Fassung vom 17.02. " 2016) ) This "right to one's own picture" refers to the fact that a picture can only be published if the rights, e.g. privacy, of the person depicted therein are protected. This means that for example if people are photographed in a private setting, for example a party or in their own house, permission needs to be obtained before the picture can be published. ("Urheberrecht und Schule" 2016, § 78)

Despite the fact that this is not necessarily related to OER, the topic was seen as important particularly due to young people's involvement in social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Often times people share pictures of others online without realizing that they are not allowed to do so unless they have received prior permission from the depicted subject. This is true not only for minors but also for adults. The fact that even adults are unaware of what this law entails was discovered during the session regarding personality rights. The two English teachers present at the time noted that they themselves were not aware of some of the constrains related to this particular part of the law. They did mention, however, that they had to deal with "Recht am eigenen Bild" when they were trying to publish pictures of students on the school website.

As a starting point for the discussion, pictures used during the British and American session were used. As seen in the appendix, some of the pictures dominantly featured people as their focus point. Therefore, students were made aware of the fact that in addition to paying close attention whether or not an image found online was released under a Creative Commons license, it was also important to get prior permission before sharing pictures featuring others.

During the explanation, one of the female students mentioned that her basketball coach often took pictures of the team during a game. This was a good opportunity to tell the students about the difference between pictures taken in a public space such as during a sports game, versus pictures taken in a private space such as one's home. While it is allowed to take pictures in a public setting, obtaining prior permission is still recommended.

("Urheberrecht und Schule" 2016)

Due to time constraints it was not possible to deepen the students' knowledge about the subject matter. This was clear from the start. However, the majority of students had never heard of personality rights and what they entailed. Therefore, this session as well as other occasions throughout the study when personality rights were mentioned, e.g. during the poster creating process, could act as a starting point for future discussion.

Study

Methodology

In order to get a better understanding of the practical usage of OER material, a study was conducted in an Austrian middle school. The participants in this study were a class of 30 students aged 11-12. 21 students were female whereas 9 were male. All of the students were German native speakers and in their second year of English study. According to the Austrian curriculum (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Frauen 2015) this means that their English should be at A1 level.

A1 refers to the lowest level used in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) which is a European guide that is used to describe the foreign language skills of language students. (Council for Cultural Co-operation 2016) All skill levels, from A1-C2 are categorized using "can" statements which refer to aspects of the language that a student of this level is able to do, for A1 the statements are all follows:

"Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type. It should be noted that the class participating in the study is special in so far that it is a so called "EAA" class. EAA refers to Englisch als Arbeitssprache or English as a working language and means that students in this particular class are taught other subjects such as math, geography and music in English rather than in German. Therefore, the level of some of the students might be higher than the A1 level suggested in the curriculum. However, the material used for the study could also have been used with a different class of beginner students of English.

It should be noted that initially the class was supposed to be a 6th grade with 15 students. While the entire class consists of 30 students for "Schularbeitenfächer", i.e. the subjects with class tests, corresponding to languages as well as math, the class is divided into two groups. This is something that is true for classes over 25 students for this particular school. However, due to the fact that all 30 students had already participated in the preliminary study, one of the English teachers suggested including both parts of the class in the main study as well.

In October 2015, over the course of the two week study, six 50 minute lessons as well as a feedback session lasting 30 minutes were held. The students were presented with material either created by the author herself or material that was based on OER material found online which was released under either a BY or BY SA license. In order to ensure that the material could be reused with as little limitation as possible the BY and BY SA licenses were chosen.

As seen from the time sheet included in the appendix, four hours at the beginning of the study were spent researching suitable language topics for the lessons. The reason for this is that the author wanted to ensure that the material taught to the students was useful for them and that it would provide them with material that would draw upon their language skills. In addition to that the material should allow students to use the skills gained over the course of the study to continue with the material used for their regular English class, i.e. the course book.

Due to the fact that English is one of the subjects where course books are used most often, (Neumann 2015, as cited in Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens and Books on Demand GmbH 2015, p.36), three English school books used and certified to be used in Austrian schools (Gerngross et al. 2009;Baer-Engel and Haß 2010;Weber and Westfall 2005) were sighted in order to get a better understanding of the subject manner taught. Initially, the curriculum for foreign language studies (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Frauen 2015) was referenced, however, no information regarding specific topics could be found. The information found in the books were compared and two topics and grammar points where chosen to be used as a basis for the current study. The grammar points chosen were comparative and superlative, as well as the present perfect simple while the topics were shopping and vacation.

Based on the results of the preliminary study it was concluded to mostly rely on analog rather than digital material during the taught lessons. Initially at least one of the lessons was supposed to be conducted in the computer lab. However, due to time constrains and a lack of Adobe Flash Player support, which made loading the exercises impossible, this intention was later dismissed. Therefore, the lessons were held in the students' regular class room which was equipped with a blackboard as well as one desktop computer and a projector.

The computer was only used while explaining the Creative Commons licensing to show the students how the website is used to license one's own work. Additionally, for listening comprehen-sions as well as a brief YouTube video, the internet was used. The reason for this was the author's intent to conduct the study in an authentic English classroom setting in order to get a better understanding of the circumstances and difficulties encountered during the course of a regular EFL lesson in Austria. Due to the fact that in the school only two computer labs are available for 14 different classes, it is difficult for English teachers to get access to the computer lab for their regular classes.

Evaluation plan

In order to get a better understanding of which areas would be analyzed during the study, an evaluation plan was created.

All together three research areas were part of the evolution plan developed at the beginning of the study. A copy of the evaluation plan can be found in the appendix.

The first key area was preparation. Throughout literature the time saving aspect has been noted on various occasions. (Hanna and Wood 2011;Sinclair et al. 2013) Rather than having to "reinvent" the wheel teachers can build upon preexisting OER material and are able to change them to suit their particular needs. In addition to that, due to the fact that material licensed under a CC license can be used without fear of copyright infringement, less time is spent checking whether or not the resource is allowed to be used in a particular setting. Due to the fact that CC material needs to be credited a certain way the time taken to credit and license the material was also evaluated. Last but not least observations regarding the reusablity factor of OER material were made.

Throughout the preparation period for the lessons, a time sheet was kept in order to get a better understanding of how much time was needed to prepare the lessons as well as for which particular purpose time was needed. It should be noted that this time sheet, which is included in the appendix, is based on the personal experience of the author herself. Therefore, while it can provide an insight into how long it took the author to prepare for and create the teaching material, it cannot be seen as a general representation for EFL teachers' preparation time. It can be seen as a snapshot that can be used as a starting point for possible future studies.

Initially interviews with EFL teaching students in their first year of teaching were supposed to be conducted in order to get a better understanding of the average time needed to create EFL teaching material. However, due to time constraints and the fact that preparation time highly depends on the individual person, the subject matter, as well as the base material, this point was not pursued further.

Another key factor that was being analyzed was the feedback from the students. Rather than focusing on learning goals and using tests in order to evaluate the improvement and progress of the students, the focus was on whether students were reluctant or accepting of OER material and if a change in motivation could be observed. In addition to that, due to the limited time frame of the study it would have been nonsensical to try and test the students' language progress since the material is still part of the students' short term memory. After all, it takes time and revision for information to be moved from the short term to the long term memory which is the goal of teaching. Additionally, it is important that students not merely study in order to do well on a test but that they are able to actively use the knowledge they have gained in the years to come.

Through observations, both by the author as well as the two classroom English teachers, the students' behavior and their general attitude in class was monitored. The two teachers, one of whom was always present during the lessons, were used as an aid in order to get a better understanding of the students' behavior. The reason for this is that the English teachers were more familiar with their students since they had been with them and teaching them for over a year. This allowed them to evaluate whether or not students were acting and reacting differently than usual and if so, why.

In addition to that, the last session was used to receive feedback directly from the students. The feedback process as well as the results received will be documented in more detail in a separate feedback chapter. Initially the feedback was supposed to be given through an informal conversation between the author and the students, index cards were provided. This was done in order to allow the students to give anonymous feedback and to allow shy students a chance to have their voices heard. However, in the end, with the exception of a few students, all decided to provide written feedback. As mentioned above, the results of the feedback session will be discussed in a later part of the thesis.

The last part of the evaluation plans is related to the target group. The students participating in the study were beginner learners of English in their second year of study. During the project seminar an hypothesis was formed that not a lot of material is available for EFL students. Therefore, the question arose how much material needed to be produced by the author herself. However, as mentioned in the chapter regarding the project seminar, more EFL website than websites for other school subjects could be found. In addition to that, repositories were not sighted during that research period.

Furthermore, no attention with regards to target level had been paid during the project seminar. Therefore, during the research period of the lesson preparation, sighted material was checked

Lessons

for its usefulness and suitability for this particular target group i.e. preteens with an English level of around A1+ is available or not.

The following section will describe the lessons held during the study in more detail. All worksheets as well as the links to the source material that was used over the course of the study are included in the appendix. Due to the detailed description provided below it was decided against including the entire lesson plans in the appendix.

better understanding of the students' prior knowledge regarding the topic of shopping. Important place names such as bakery, hardware store and grocery store, as well as useful idioms and phrases were collected on the blackboard. This was done prior to handing out the worksheets to the students in order not to influence the students' answers. The point of comparisons was also briefly brought up during that time.

A shopping dialog was used as a starting point for the lesson because it was seen as a good way to talk about the comparative and superlative forms. The reason for this is that going shopping is an activity that all students can relate to in their daily lives. It was also seen as a setting that would appeal to both a male and female audience because the items bought during the dialog could easily be changed to fit the students' personal preferences. However, due to the fact that no appropriate dialog with a Creative Commons license could be found online, the text mentioned above was used as a guideline in order to create a dialog suitable for the students' needs as well as a worksheet to help them with their dialog creation.

The dialog was used as an awareness-raising activity. ("Awarenessraising | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC" 2016) This means that rather than students being asked to actively use the forms presented in the text, they were supposed to read the text and discuss it together with a partner in order to get a better understanding of the text as well as the new grammar point introduced. Once the students had finished reading and had time to talk to their neighbors, the students were asked to discuss their findings with the entire class.

This method allowed students to be an active part in the grammar explanation process. Rather than only receiving information from the teacher, they could actively participate and contribute. The grammar was then explained in more detail using the blackboard which included not only the formation process but also example sentences.

In addition to the dialog, the students were provided with a separate worksheet that talked about the comparative and superlative form, their formation as well as their usage. Receiving the worksheet allowed the students to focus on the explanation and discussion taking place in class instead of having to focus on writing everything down in time to ensure that no information was lost.

The reason why this information was provided on a separate worksheet rather than including it on the shopping worksheet was to allow students to add the sheet to a separate grammar section in their notebooks if they preferred to have all grammar points stored together in one place. In retrospect, it would have been better to include at least some part of the grammar on the other worksheet provided as explained further down below.

During the lessons the students were working together in pairs in order to create their own shopping dialog based on the one provided to them. The reason why they were asked to complete the task in pairs was in order to enable them to communicate with each other and help each other when brainstorming ideas on their own. As mentioned above, the students were provided with a worksheet that contained useful vocabulary as well as sentence starters to act as scaffolding.

Scaffolding is used in teaching in order to provide students with guidance and hints when trying to solve a problem while allowing "learners to figure it out on their own. " (Sawyer 2008, p. 6) As described by Sawyer ( 2008) "scaffolding is gradually added, modified, and removed according to the needs of the learner" (Sawyer 2008, p. 11), therefore, particularly when students are first encountering a problem they had not encountered before, it is important to provide them with some form of scaffolding in order to help them. Sawyer (2008) also states that this scaffolding can later be minimized and eventually removed once students are more familiar with the topic.

Due to time constrains students were asked to finish the dialog individually as a homework task. However, while looking through and correcting the exercises during the start of the next lesson, it was discovered that most of the students did not include the grammar point as intended, but rather focused on other elements of the shopping dialog. This means that rather than using the comparative in order to compare various objects, such as their structure and price, they used ways to avoid using said grammar points.

In retrospect one of the reasons for this might be that the students were not provided with example sentences using the comparative forms but, as stated above, sentence starters and useful vocabulary. While the students actively got inspired by and used phrases from the worksheet, the grammar points were not included. Therefore, in the following lessons the usage of the comparative form and its connection to the shopping dialog was reinforced. The students were then handed back their homework and asked to add to their already well written texts until the following lesson.

Teachers who intend to reuse the worksheet provided are therefore encouraged to add more information and usage examples to the shopping worksheet rather than providing it only as a separate worksheet as was the case here. This can be done e.g. by adding sample sentences from the provided dialog.

because some words included were deemed too easy while additional terms were added. Unlike the original exercise, this new glossary included a translation of the words rather than an English explanation. The reason why this change was made is because some of the explanations would have been more difficult to understand for the students. Additionally, since the English school book the students were using during their regular English lessons contained German translations rather than explanations, this method was chosen.

In general, the main point of the story is that a raccoon is trying to find the car best suited for his needs. Therefore, he goes to a car dealer and uses various comparative and superlative forms in order to compare a variety of cars. He ends up not buying any of the cars offered to him since he does not have any money to pay for it. In the end he is allowed to ride a garbage truck and discovers that this is the perfect car for him.

The original exercise had some comprehension questions, including some questions related to cars. However, due to the young age of the students, as well as the fact that some of them might not be interested in cars, this part was omitted from the final exercise.

Seeing as the above mentioned exercise was a rather quiet one and the lesson was held in the early morning it became apparent that the students were feeling a bit sleepy. Therefore a game was played in order make them get up from their seats and improve comprehension. For the purpose of the game the students were divided into two teams. It should be noted that the blackboard available in class consisted of two parts as can be seen in Figure 5, included in the chapter regarding the British and American lesson, i.e. lesson four.

Each team had one part of the blackboard to themselves. On each of the blackboards a list of adjectives in the positive form i.e. the base form of an adjective for example: good, bad, happy, beautiful, etc. was provided. The students were then asked to race each other and add the comparative as well as the superlative forms next to the positive form of the word. The game not only allowed students to review the grammar points but also allowed the author to see whether there were any problems or not.

During the game it was discovered that a majority of the students still had difficulties understanding the usage of "the" with regards to the superlative form. This was surprising because of the similarities between the English and German formation of the superlative form. English uses the definite article "the" in front of the superlative form e.g. "She is the smartest girl. He is the most handsome boy.", while German also uses the definite articles "der, die or das", for example: "Sie ist das schlaueste Mädchen. Er ist der hübscheste Junge." Due to these problems it was decided to create another written exercise in order to reinforce how to create and use the superative form.

During the exercise, the students first wrote their sentences on a scrap piece of paper and then the teacher walked around to ensure that the sentences were grammatically correct. Furthermore, the students could ask for clarification regarding the grammar as well as vocabulary. Afterwards, the students wrote the sentences on the poster and used washi tape in order to adhere the pictures. This was useful because it meant that the photographs were not damaged since almost all of them were analog pictures rather than printouts because a few students voiced their desire to take the photographs home once the topic of vacation had been completed.

Later, the projector and desktop computer available in class were used in order to navigate to the Creative Commons website ("Creative Commons Deutschland" 2016) The reason for this was to explain and show the students how to license something under a Creative Commons license. For this purpose the German version of the website was used in order to ensure that the students fully understood the steps required to license a work under CC. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the students had been introduced to the various CC license components, i.e. BY, SA, NC and ND.

In order to protect the integrity of the students a BY NC ND license was chosen as the license for the poster. In addition to that, since the students previously had difficulty understanding the SA concept, the BY NC ND license was chosen because it was easier for them to understand. After all it is important that people realize what others are and are not allowed to do with their material once it has been released under a Creative Commons license. This is particularly important because a CC license is irrevocable ("Frequently Asked Questions -Creative Commons" 2016) which means that once a user has obtained material licensed under a certain CC license they are allowed to use the material based on the terms of the license even if said license has been changed or removed. ("Frequently Asked Questions -Creative Commons" 2016)

In retrospect it would have been interesting to see which license the students would have chosen themselves. However, since a letter to the legal guardians had to be written in order to obtain permission for the students to license the material due to the fact that they were underage, it was decided to use a predetermined license.

However, if a similar study would be conducted with a group of older students, it would be beneficial to have them decide on one for themselves. The students then can explain the reasons why they chose a particular license over the other and this could be used a starting point for a group discussion. Choosing their own license would also allow students to have a bigger connection to OER as a whole. Because the main purpose of the study was

practical usage of OER material rather than students actively creating and using OER, this point was not pursued further.

At the end of the exercise, once the students had finished the poster (Figure 8) and the licensing process had been explained to them, the students were asked to pick a name to be used as the author's name for the license. The class decided to go with their class number and name. This way, despite the fact that the students were not able to choose a license themselves they were still involved in the licensing process. The time taken for writing the present perfect sentences as well as adding the pictures to the poster varied for each student. Therefore, an additional exercise needed to be created for the students that had already finished their tasks. Additionally, it was thought that having a written gap filling exercise that was related to the topic of vacation would be suitable in order to reinforce the grammar structure and usage.

Throughout the study, none of the OER material found online was used "as is" but rather material was adjusted in one way or another in order to best suit the needs of the students or in order to avoid copyright infringement. The gap filling exercise used during the lesson is one of the examples were the changes made were minor. Figure 9 is the exercise used as a base for the postcard worksheet presented in the appendix. As can be seen above, the text used for the postcard was very fitting for the topic of vacation, as well as the grammar point present perfect simple. Therefore, the text was kept in tact, however, the background image was removed in order to make the text more legible, particularly due to the fact that copies needed to be made.

Furthermore, no information regarding whether or not the author of the worksheet created the pictures themselves was available. In order to avoid a possible copyright infringement due to the lack of proper credit to the photographer, the images were removed. Instead, an image found on the Flickr website was used as a substitute in order to make the exercise more visually appealing to the students.

Additionally, one minor element of the text was changed. The word "marvelous" was changed to "fantastic" . The reason for this is that marvelous was thought to be a term the students were unfamiliar with and due to the already difficult nature of the present perfect tense, attention was paid to ensure that the students had to deal with as little new vocabulary as possible.

It should be noted that unlike the other material used for this study, obtaining this file required prior registration to the website. (iSLCOLLECTIVE 2016) This meant that an email address, username and password needed to be supplied in order to be able to download the material. No payment was required. While this means that the material is not 100 % open in the sense that it can be downloaded by anyone without prior registration, due to its relevance to the topic of the exercises it was nevertheless included.

After each student had finished working on the poster the students' answers for the gap filling exercise where compared. Due to the fact that not a lot of active usage of the present perfect simple had occurred prior to the lesson the students had some difficulties during the exercise. Therefore, the rules and the usage of the experience notion of the present perfect simple where explained again in order to ensure that the students were provided with a good basis for future study of the present perfect simple.

This session also marked the last "active" lesson of the study.

That is to say that this was the last lesson where the students received material and input. The following lesson was used for feedback. As mentioned in the evaluation plan, a significant part of the study was related to the students' feedback. After all OER material can only be seen as useful if the students using them consider them to be useful.

Lesson One

For the first lesson a shopping dialog was created. The exercise used as a base was created under a BY 2.5 Creative Commons license. The base exercise consisted of remixed material. That is to say that the material consisted of various parts that had been created prior and with a variety of licenses. However, when scrolling down to find the complete credits underneath the Creative Commons license notice it stated that "Pictures by Google Images and Patricia Pérez Miguel". (Peleteiro 2016) "Google images" is not a proper way to credit an image source because the original copyright holder is not explicitly stated and therefore, no information regarding under which license a material is released can be provided. Therefore, it cannot be ensured whether the image has been released under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain and is thereby allowed to be reused. Furthermore, due to the fact that no link to the source image is given, it is not possible to check under which license the original picture was released. This means that the images could not be used in the resulting exercise and therefore needed to be replaced. The images used in the exercises were replaced with an image found on Flickr which was released under an appropriate Creative Commons license. Only the text passages that were credited under a Creative Commons license were used.

This shows one of the issues involved when it comes to reusing Open Educational Resources. Particularly with pictures, appropriate credit is not necessarily provided by the users creating the exercises. In this case the images were clearly stated to come from a different source than the original author, however, this is not always the case, as can be seen on various occasions throughout the study.

At the beginning of the lesson a brainstorming session was held together with the students. The point of this session was to get a

Lesson Two

For the second lesson the comparative form introduced in the first lesson was being reinforced. Due to a vocabulary review that had been announced prior to the study, about ten minutes of the lesson were taught by one of the original English teachers. During this time the students had a vocabulary quiz while the author had time to look through and partially correct the students' homework. As mentioned in the last section of the previous chapter, the students did not include the grammar points as intended and were therefore given back their homework and asked to add to their dialog until the following lesson.

The lesson started with a review of the grammar points discussed in the previous lessons. After that the students were given a text to read in order to practice the comparative forms. The exercise was chosen because the text was seen as a fun and interesting read that would still include elements from the last lesson i.e. a shopping dialog, as well as the comparative forms. At the same time the text offered a spin to a regular shopping dialog because rather than a human, a raccoon was the main protagonist.

The exercise was based on an exercise created by Walton Burns (2016) . Both the text as well as the image included in it were used as a base, however, the material was adapted in order to fit the particular needs of the students. This was in part possible not only due to the Creative Commons license but also because of the file format. The format in which OER material is represented is very important. If the file format is too restrictive, e.g. if a text is only available in PDF format, it becomes more difficult to make changes and adopt the text to the students' particular needs. Therefore an open, easily editable file is recommended. (Richter et al. 2014;Amiel 2013) In the case of the text used for this exercise, it was provided in both PDF and Word format. On the one hand this allowed for easier printing but on the other hand it also allowed users to edit the material if needed.

The text was adapted and the formatting was changed. This was done because in the original exercise all comparative and superlative forms were highlighted by being written in italics. However, in order to make students more aware of the forms included in the text, the italic words were changed back to a non-italic format i.e. to the same format as the rest of the text.

In doing so, the students could do the highlighting themselves. Therefore, once again becoming more aware of the different forms and how they are used in sentences.

First the students were asked to read the text silently on their own and to complete the highlighting exercise. This was done in order to allow students to read at their own pace without having to worry about being called on to read out loud. Once all the students had finished reading the findings were compared together in class.

The original exercise included a glossary that contained explanations for more difficult words. This glossary was adapted

Lesson Three

The third lesson also dealt with the topic of comparison. While the students had already learned about how to form and use both the comparative and superlative forms, they had only learned how to write simple sentences that did not compare people or objects directly. That is to say that students wrote sentences such as "Lisa is the most beautiful girl in my class! Tim is smart but Lisa is smarter." However, the second sentence can also be rewritten as: "Lisa is smarter than Tim." While this usage of "than" to form a direct comparison had been introduced earlier, the students were not actively using it in their writing. Therefore, as an introduction a comparative exercise was done with the entire class.

Asking students directly to compare each other could have led to problems because the sentences formed might have led to hurt feelings and students feeling embarrassed. However, in order to make the exercise more relevant to the students the teachers were used as examples. Since one of the two English teachers as well as the author was present during the lesson, various comparative sentences such as "Maria is younger than Mrs. C.", were being formed. The students seemed to enjoy the exercise and a few students even asked to volunteer when talking about things such as height, age and hair length.

After the exercise was over, the students were given a worksheet to complete with a partner. The students were given an objective by the author before receiving the exercise: "Maria wants to buy a new cellphone. However, she is unsure about which one to choose." Therefore, the students had an additional reason in order to do the exercise. Details about how the worksheet came to be and its creating process will be discussed in a later chapter.

The exercise consists of a table with three columns each with a current generation smart phone by a different brand. These brands were Blackberry, Apple and Samsung. In addition to a picture of the phone, various technical information such as screen size, battery etc. were provided. Together with a partner the students had to investigate various statements to figure out whether they were true or not. Furthermore, the students were asked to answer a variety of comprehension question as well as questions regarding their own personal interests.

It should be noted that there were some issues related to this exercise because the author had accidentally saved and printed an older version of the exercise which included questions the students were not able to answer because the information was not provided. This can be seen as one of the aspects to consider with regards to OER. Unlike school books which are checked by editors in order to avoid mistakes like this from happening, OER material is often created by just one person.

However, it should be noted that in 2007 Siftung Warentest conducted a study investigating history and biology books in Germany which lead to the conclusion that a predominant amount of them contained mistakes. ("Schulbücher -Schlechtes Zeugnis -Test -Stiftung Warentest" 2016) When (Ebner et al. 2014) checked the reprints of the previously examined textbooks, it was discovered that none of the suggestions for possible correction and revision had been implemented and that the mistakes were still there.

This shows that even published school books are not infallible. However, unlike textbooks that take months to be printed and revised, due to the particular nature of OER, it is relatively easy to fix these mistakes in a short period of time if an open, i.e. easily editable, file format is chosen. This was the case with the above mentioned exercise since the file was available in a MS Word format. Therefore, the wrong sentences could be changed and the English teachers were provided with the correct and revised version.

The students were very engaged when doing the smart phone exercise. One of the reasons for this is that students could relate to wanting to buy a new cellphone and students were eager to demonstrate that their preferred brand was superior. This could also be seen during the voting that was held after the exercise was completed and the results were compared in class. Students were asked to vote which one of the phones they thought was the best i.e. which phone the author should buy. Heated discussions arose during this part of the exercise which show that the students were highly engaged.

It should be noted that technical parts included in the original exercise were changed because it was thought that the students would be unfamiliar with certain technical terms. One example of this was gigahertz when talking about processing power. Since it was seen as too difficult the information was removed in the final exercise.

However, as mentioned above a wrong version was printed which included the question: "Which smart phone is the fastest?" One of the students and his partner made the author aware of her mistake saying that the processing power was missing and they therefore were not able to determine the answer. This shows that some of the student would have benefited from including more complex technical information since they were familiar with it.

On the other hand some of the students had difficulties with terms such as memory and battery. This means that depending on the class composition, more or less complex questions and information can be included.

After the comparison exercise was over the students were asked for one last homework task related to the comparative and superlative form. Due to the fact that during the shopping dialog exercise not all of the students used the target grammar point, an additional written exercise was created in order to give the students more practice and a meaningful setting to use the grammar point. Therefore, a suitable topic that was relevant to all students needed to be found.

One of the units in the students' school book from the previous year (Weber and Westfall 2006) included an exercise regarding pets. Additionally, during the preliminary study when the students were asked to introduce themselves and talk about their lives, almost all of the students talked about their pets. Therefore, the students were familiar with the vocabulary needed in order to describe a pet. It should be noted, that since pets are usually seen as part of the family, they are discussed at an early stage in the English language learning progress.

Furthermore, the lesson was held during the end of October which meant that Halloween was on the horizon. In order to inoperative the holiday at least to some minor degree, the author decided to create an exercise titled "superpet" which was based on an image of a dog dressed in a superhero costume found on the Flickr website. (McCune 2016)

In addition to featuring pictures of pets dressed in superhero costumes, the worksheet include a picture of the popular Marvel "Avengers" characters in LEGO format that could be used by the students to get inspiration for their texts. Initially, the Avengers were supposed to be used as the main focus of the exercise, however, since it could not be assumed that all students were familiar with all of the characters from the movie it was decided against doing so. Teachers who are more familiar with their students are be able to easily change the exercise in order to shift the focus from the pets to the Avenger characters.

Since students noted that they had trouble finding ideas and knowing what to write about, and one of the students explicitly asked for example sentences during an earlier exercise, this was provided to them. The exercise not only included example sentences but also included a list of useful adjectives the students could include in their text. Rather than simply having to write a text, the students were also asked to draw a picture of their superpet so the reader could get a better idea of what the pet looked like. This part was included in order to allow students to be more creative and to make their texts more visible.

The exercise went really well and the students seemed to enjoy it. Initially, the author was reluctant to include the drawing part, however, according to the students' feedback during the lesson, they liked being able to create and write about their own super-pet along with drawing a picture of it. The comparative forms were used appropriately and little to no mistakes were made.

It should be noted, however, that the frequency of comparative usage could have been improved by including a different pet the students could use in order to compare their superpet to.

In addition to that it would also have been possible, as stated above, to have the students compare the characters from the Avengers.

Due to the fact that images acted as the inspiration for the final exercise rather than another educational resource, in this context the OER term was stretched in order to include not only material predominantly considered and produced for teaching but material created for other purposes released under a Creative Commons license. Another example for this is presented in Muuß-Merholz and Schaumburg (2014) with regards to the platform Open StreetMap. Due to the fact that picture are said to be the most used OER material for teachers (Richter and Ehlers 2010), using an image as the base for an exercise was considered to be relevant.

Lesson Four

One of the lessons taught during the study was adopted from a previous lesson the author had taught during one of her first practical English teaching sessions. As mentioned earlier, Austrian students who want to become teachers for middle school or high school are required to hold lessons in a real class but with a mentor present at all times. The first of this two part practical teaching is typically held during one of the first semesters of study. Therefore, the original lesson discussed below was conducted four years prior to the current study.

The lesson was created in order to give the students an overview of the differences between British and American English. In Austrian schools, students are predominantly taught British English and often times students are not aware that there are differences between these two language variations. Similarly to the differences between Austrian German and German German certain terms have different meanings depending on the country in which they are uttered.

Furthermore, the pronunciation between British and American English differs. It should be noted that the author speaks with an American accent whereas the teachers the students were mostly familiar with speak with a British accent. Therefore, the lesson was held in order to make students more aware of these unique difference. In addition to that it also provided a good introduction to the topic of vacation and traveling to other countries.

As mentioned above, the original lesson had been created four years earlier. However, rather than being able to simply reuse all the material created and used during the lesson, this was not possible due to lack of OER material. Therefore, while the ideas could be used as a basis for the new lesson, the material itself needed to be created anew. The reason for this is that a certain threshold of originality needs to exist in order for material to be copyright-able; ideas cannot be copyrighted. ("Forum neue Medien Austria" 2016) Since the lesson worked really well with the students in the original class, the material was adopted to fit OER standards so that the newly created material could easily be reused.

As an introduction and in order to illustrate the importance of knowing the differences between British and American English, the students listened to a short retelling of Roald Dahl's "The Ant-Eater" (Dahl and Blake 2012) The story talks about a spoiled American boy that gets a new pet namely an anteater. The anteater is close to starving and the boy tells him to find an ant to eat. When the boy's aunt comes to visit the anteater mistakes her for a giant ant due to the fact that in American English both aunt and ant are pronounced the same way. The story provided a fun way to start the lesson and to grab the students' attention.

The lesson was predominantly based on pictures that would act as a stimuli for students. Flickr was used in order to find suitable pictures that could be used for the discussion of the topic. Furthermore, since some of the pictures visibly showed people, these pictures were used as a starting point to start the discussion about personality rights as well as the right to one's own picture and the problems encountered because of that. More detail regarding these two issues are discussed in the Legal Situation in Austria chapter.

As seen in Figure 5, pictures taken from the Flickr website were printed and added to the blackboard. The students were then asked to get up and move to the front of the room to collaborate and add the correct British and American terms that were written on index cards and spread out on the teachers' desk below the pictures on the blackboard. The class was held during the second period so some of the students were still a bit tired. Therefore, this method was chosen in order to wake them up, and in order to change their perspective since they are usually seated during the lessons. Additionally, the exercise was chosen to encourage them to communicate with each other in order to solve the problem at hand. The goal of the exercise was not to find a "winner" and someone who knows the most but rather for the students to communicate and cooperate with each other by asking around and relying on each other when answering the questions.

It should be noted that according to the Creative Commons website, material released under a Creative Commons license with a version prior to 4.0 needs to have a reference to the title in the credit if one is given. ("License Versions -Creative

Commons" 2016) However, in order for this exercise, as well as the memory containing the same images, to work, including the title would have defeated the purpose of the exercise. The reason for this is that the title of the image often would have "given away" the answer, students were supposed to find themselves. E.g. a picture of an island resort that was titled "Ah! Vacation" was supposed to represent both the British word "holiday" as well as the American term "vacation". Therefore, the title was not included in the files presented to the students. However, the files included in the appendix as well as the files sent to the teachers at the end of the session both included references to the title. This allows teachers to reuse the exercise for purposes when knowing the title does not interfere with the main object of the created exercise.

As stated above, a memory game was created out of the pictures used for the previous exercise. The title of the image was once again not included in the material provided to the students in order to allow the exercise to work properly. While it would have been possible to exclude other parts of the attribution process because attribution should be made reasonable to "Medium and means, with exceptions"("License Versions -Creative Commons" 2016) for works licensed under a CC suite before 4.0, except for the title, the credit was kept as is. This means that the original author as well as a link to the Creative Commons license agreement was included. The reason for this is that the author wanted to draw the students' attention to the importance of crediting. Therefore, when one of the students asked whether or not he could remove the credits from the final memory card, he was told not to so in order to keep some form of credit to the original author present at all time.

The reason why the memory game was chosen is because it was a good exercise to reinforce the vocabulary taught. Rather than only encountering the words one time, the students could test their vocabulary knowledge while at the same time enjoying the fun of the game. In addition to that the students could create the cards themselves by cutting out the words and corresponding pictures. Therefore, making the exercise more relevant and appealing to them because they could contribute to the creation process themselves. The exercise was also used as a way to make students aware of the differences between OER material and a school book. The reason for this is that they were allowed to cut out and create their own material, as can be seen in Figure 6 and Figure 7, something that would not be possible with a regular school book because cutting out pieces is often not permitted. In addition to familiarizing the students with the differences in vocabulary, the class held a brainstorming session in order to find other differences. The input mostly came from the students themselves which showed that they were aware of some of these differences already. However, collecting them and writing them down on the blackboard reinforced the fact that British and American English are not the same.

The students also received a written exercise that included a list of British and American terms. Together with a partner, they were supposed to find the correct German terms for the words used. This activity was created because during the creation process of the memory it was discovered that some important and useful words, e.g. "restroom" and "first floor", were missing. However, adding these words to the memory would have created a game with too many cards. That is why in the end it was decided against add them to the game. This is why the worksheet was included in order to allow students to get a better understanding of these words as well. In the future, this exercise could also easily be used to create an additional memory game or swap out terms as seen fit. In addition to that, if more time had been available, it would have been possible to let the students create their own memory games based on the vocabulary they found most useful. However, due to time constraints this was not pursued further.

Based on the observations by both the author as well as the English teachers, it could be seen that the students really enjoyed being able to create their "own" materials. They enjoyed cutting out the pieces and liked the fact that they were able to keep the material rather than having to give it back to the teacher at the end of the lesson. During the preliminary study it was observed that students were surprised when they were allowed to keep the material used to create games and group-activity. The reason for this is that as mentioned above, the material was usually handed back to the teacher. Therefore, keeping the material themselves added to the enjoyment of the students.

Due to time constrains the author was not able to try out the game with the students during the research period. However, the students played the game with their Canadian teaching assistant in one of the following lessons. According to reports from both English teachers, the students really enjoyed playing the game, were able to recall a lot of the information taught during the lesson and thereby as a result, were able to teach new words to their teaching assistant. This is interesting because, as mentioned above, the teaching assistant is a native English speaker.

Lesson Five

In the second to last lesson the students were introduced to the present perfect simple tense and in particular the notion of experience (Newby 1992) The present perfect simple can be divided into various notions and the experience notion was chosen due to its relevance to the topic of vacation, since Newby (1992) explicitly lists holiday postcards as one of the usage examples. After all when one talks about his or her previous vacations it is only natural to use the present perfect tense to refer to new experiences they have come across during their stay. Further details with regards to the present perfect will be provided in a later part of the study.

In addition to that the worksheet handed to the students in-cluded information regarding another notion, namely "changes and completion". (Newby 1992) As the name suggests, hereby the present perfect simple is used in order to talk about things that were different in the past and have since changed. The grammar explanation of this notion was added to the worksheet in order to allow the English teachers to reuse the worksheet once the study had been completed.

At the beginning of the lesson a YouTube video was shown to the students to act as a review of the previous lesson. The Creative Commons search feature ("CC Search" 2016) made it easy to find openly licensed YouTube videos. Unlike other websites searched using the CC search engine, the resulting videos found were all released under a Creative Commons license. The YouTube video featured a young Canadian man who had been living in the UK for a longer period of time as well as his female British friend. During the video they were talking about the difference between British and North American accents. Despite the fact that the previous lesson had been focused on American rather than Canadian English due to its similarities in vocabulary as well as pronunciation the video was included.

The video consisted of two parts, the first one focused on differences in pronunciation whereas the second part focused on differences with regards to vocabulary. In the first part both parties pronounce a given word in their native accent which led to different results. In the second part they talked about vocabulary that was different such as "restroom" and "loo" being used to talk about the toilet. While watching parts of the video, the students were asked to "vote" to see whether they are more British or (North) American. The students seemed to enjoy the video and were very talkative and engaged during the exercise.

During the preliminary study the author had noticed that the students would talk about YouTube videos they had watched with their friends. Seeing as YouTube videos are highly popular with teenagers in this particular age group, a YouTube video rather than a different form of material was chosen for reviewing purposes. Due to the relatively young age of the video participants the students could relate to them more easily.

In order to introduce the students to the topic of the present perfect simple, as well as vacation and different countries, the author started the lesson with a monologue about her experience in Japan. For this purpose pictures taken during her 5 month long stay in Japan were presented to the students. While talking about her past experiences the past tense was used but throughout the monologue students were asked about their own experiences.

For example sentences such as "Has anyone of you ever been to Japan? Have you ever seen a panda in real life? Have you ever eaten sushi?" were asked directly to the class to receive feedback and act as an awareness raising activity. In addition to that it allowed the students to get to know the author better and also showed them a way to talk about their own traveling experiences.

After the monologue, a game of "two truths and one lie" was played. For this purpose the author wrote down three sentences using the present perfect tense, two of the statements were true and one was a lie. The students had to guess the correct answer and the exercise was repeated by one of the students.

The grammar point explanation was once again based on the material provided by ("Mobile ESL | Athabasca Universityty" 2016). Once again, the usage of the grammar points as well as its formation were explained in German rather than English in order to avoid confusion. Furthermore, the two different notions mentioned on the worksheet were presented using the blackboard. The main emphasis was put on the notion of experience due to its relevance to the topic. However, since the notion of change is also frequently used a brief explanation of this notion was provided as well.

The last exercise of the lesson was a listening comprehension.

Prior to that the students had not been exposed to the English of native speakers during the study with the exception of the above mentioned YouTube video. Therefore it was important to the author to include another listening activity. For this purpose a listening exercise from the website elllo was chosen. ("English Listening Lesson Library Online" 2016)

Despite the fact that there were some licensing issues found with regards to this website, which will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter, the students listened to one of the audio files provided on the website. The reason why the activity was chosen despite the issues is that the students did not actively receive the audio file. In addition to that no listening comprehension exercise that was suitable to the students' level as well as the topic at hand could be found.

It should be noted that during this lesson the students were given an introduction to OER and Creative Commons licenses in particular which ended up taking longer than expected. The reason why OER was introduced in more detail is that the students were supposed to license material under a CC license during the following lesson. Therefore it was important to familiarize the students with the different licensing options. During this explanation it was discovered that the students had difficulties to understand the ShareAlike aspect of CC licenses.

The students were asked to bring holiday pictures from one of their previous vacations to the following lesson. Furthermore, the students were given a letter for their legal guardians that explained the licensing process taking place the following lesson.

Lesson Six

In order to reinforce the grammar point and to make it more relevant to the students, they were asked to bring pictures from their previous vacations so that the entire class could create a poster together. In addition, next to the pictures the students would write a sentence related to the picture using the present perfect simple tense. In order to illustrate the OER creating process or rather the Creative Commons licensing process, the finished poster would later be licensed under a Creative Commons license.

However, releasing material under a Creative Commons license was not that easy due to the fact that the students were underage. Therefore, in order to make this exercise possible, written permission from the legal guardians of the students needed to be obtained. The students were given a letter for their parents to ask permission to license the poster under a Creative Commons license.

In addition to that, the parents were asked to have the students bring pictures from a previous vacation with them the following lesson. It should be noted that the parents were made aware of the fact that the pictures should feature landscapes and food rather than people in order to avoid conflict with personality rights.

At the start of the lesson another unexpected problem occurred, only about half of the students had an analog photograph with them while the other students either forgot to bring one at all or only had their photos available in digital format on their smartphones. Printing the pictures would have taken too long which would have made the already tight schedule impossible to keep.

Thankfully a few of the students took a few pictures with them and were willing to share with their colleagues. While this defeated the authentic nature of the exercise the students were still able to identify with the pictures since they all had visited similar countries before such as Italy and Croatia. In the end, each student had at least one picture that he or she could add to the poster.

In retrospect, the permission slip handed to the parents should have been more explicit regarding the physical nature of the photograph required. Additionally, for future exercises it would be better to either make sure that a printing device is available so that students can print the pictures in school if needed or create the poster in a digital manner. Due to the fact that a computer lab was not available, it was not possible to create a digital poster. The students had only briefly been introduced to the present perfect simple before and so still needed some assistance, therefore, it would have been unfeasible to make this exercise a homework task.

Discussion

Feedback

The last session was used in order to receive feedback directly from the students. During the feedback session all 30 students were present and the major findings are discussed below.

Since during the preliminary study the feedback received was focused on the author and her teaching style as a whole rather than the material used, students were provided with some guiding questions they were supposed to answer. In addition to that, students were encouraged to include their own thought and feeling in addition to answering the questions. As seen below the questions were focused on the overall enjoyment of the students, opinions regarding OER as well as the material itself and the way it compared to material used in their "regular" English lessons.

• Was it different? If so: how?

• Do you understand OER better now?

• Did you learn something? If so: what?

• How was the material compared to the book?

• Were the copies useful or not?

• How can the material be improved?

Initially the feedback was supposed to be orally, in the form of an informal conversation between the author and the students. However, in order to make sure that each students' voice and perspective was heard, index cards that allowed students to give written feedback were chosen as a supplementary format.

Additionally, this meant that the feedback could be provided anonymously if the students preferred to do so.

In the end, most of the students opted for the written feedback with only a few gave their feedback directly to the author. Initially, the questions were supposed to be in English as well, however, in order to ensure that the students understood each question and to enable them to answer without language barrier, the questions as well as the feedback by the students were in German.

One of the students noted: "I really enjoyed using the worksheets because I could look back on it if I had difficulties understanding something. However, if you forget to hole punch the worksheets it is difficult not to loose them." In general students noted that they where overwhelmed by the large amount of worksheets and six students noted that they did not like the worksheets because there were too many of them. Two of the students noted that their folders became overstuffed due to the worksheets.

During the study, the students received 9 worksheets each. In addition to that the pictures for exercises needed to be printed as well. This means that all together over the course of two weeks or 6 lessons around 420 copies where produced. This is a large amount of paper that was needed in order to make the lessons possible. While it would have been possible to decrease the number of copies by printing double sided, it was decided against it in order to increase flexibility. Two students suggested to make the copies more "fun and colorful" in order to make them more appealing. However, due to the large amount of worksheets it was only possible to provide students with black and white copies.

Since the class was not a laptop or tablet class it could not be assumed that each student had one of these device that could be brought to school. If this had been the case, the material would have been distributed digitally in order to decrease the used paper and make the material even more flexible. Due to the fact that the school's website and moodle platform had recently undergone changes and the English teachers did not have know how to upload and use the platforms these options were not persuade.

With the exception of two students all other 28 noted that they enjoyed the lessons. In particular the fact that games were played in order to incorporate the grammar was seen as positive. Other than the fact that the textbook was not used, this was also noted as one of the aspects in which the lessons were different from their "usual" English lesson. It is interesting to note is that students mentioned the games and fun activities but also noted that they learned a lot and had to do a lot compared to their regular English lessons. This goes to show that it is possible to include meaningful activities that are both, fun and challenging, at the same time.

Two of the students also positively mentioned the memory game and the fact that they were able to create it themselves by cutting it out, something that would not have been possible with an activity provided in the school book.

The feedback with regards to the OER material was mostly positive. Students either seemed to prefer the handouts provided or categorize them as, "as good as the course book". The only exception were five students who explicitly noted that they preferred using the school books. Most of the students did not provide any additional information with regards to why they preferred one over the other. However, the few students who did mention, among other things that the OER material included better explanations than the school book.

During the feedback session, two students stated that they thought that "the whole OER thing was overrated". While the rest of the students noted that they had a better understanding of OER overall, three students noted that they still had difficulties fully understanding what it meant. In addition to that, at the beginning of the study students were not aware of or familiar with copyright as a whole. One of the students noted that she did not know that she was not allowed to simply use Google image search in order to find pictures to use in her presentations.

This reaction is not surprising, since the general unawareness and confusion with regards to copyright has been noted in various studies. (Hylén 2006;Richter and Ehlers 2010) If adults who are involved in creating material on a daily basis, are having difficulties understanding the problems involved in using copyrighted materials, how can one expect 12-year-olds to know? However, since these students are part of the next generation of adults, it is important to educate them about these issues as soon as possible, because this will make sure that they are familiar with, and hopefully care about, theses issues in the future.

At the end of the study, the author asked for feedback from the two English teachers, one of which was always present in the lessons over the course of the study. While the author was able to familiarize herself with the students during the preliminary study period, there is still a difference between teaching for a few lessons or being their class teacher all year round. Therefore, during the study the author not only relied on her own observations but also talked to the class teachers in order to establish whether any changes in the behavior of the students could be found.

According to emails received from the two English teachers in class, the students were more engaged than usual. While it might be the case that some of the engagement was due to the fact that the teacher was different, one of the teachers noted that she thought that the reason for this was because of the material used.

In her opinion, the material was more "authentic". Rather than telling students to open the book on page 12 they seemed to prefer the fact that the material was created "especially for them". In addition to that, the teacher noted that the students seemed to understand more of the material taught due to the fact that it was created for them. (e-mail message to author, October 30, 2015)

During the feedback session, one of the students noted that he enjoyed hearing and learning about Open Educational Resources and that because of the lessons and the fact that the students were introduced to Creative Commons licenses, he had decided to release his own computer programs, that he created using visual basic, under a Creative Commons license. While according to the Creative Commons websites, computer programs are not recommended to be released under a CC license but rather "licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed as "open source" by the Open Source Initiative."("Frequently Asked Questions -Creative Commons" 2016) it is nevertheless a step in the right direction if the student plans to implement the information learned in class.

As mentioned above, during the feedback session, as well as the feedback received during the lessons, the students really enjoyed the way in which the lessons were taught. That is to say that the students liked the games that were be played while still feeling like they learned something. OER, due to its open and flexible nature, allows for a more learner centered teaching approach. This means that rather than only receiving input from the teacher, students are able to interact with each other and the teacher acts more like a facilitator rather than an omniscient leader. ("Student-centred learning -Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" 2016) While a teacher centered approach was chosen for grammar explanations, due to the limited time frame, the rest of the lessons mostly consisted of either pair exercises or exercises that involved the entire class.

This shows that incorporating and using OER material in an EFL classroom setting is possible and that the students had a positive response to the used OER material. However, it should be noted that these findings cannot be seen as a general representation of Austrian students due to the relatively small size of participating students.

Preparation

Preparation time was the one main area of evaluation. As mentioned in the chapter regarding the evaluation plan, a time sheet was kept over the course of the study in order to determine how long it took the author to create the finished lessons. Once again, this section deals with a subjective matter and therefore, the results cannot be generalized for teachers in general.

As can be seen in the time sheet included in the appendix, the first few hours of work were spent researching appropriate subject matters. As mentioned in a previous chapter, Austrian school books used in 6th grade for English teaching were compared in order to find suitable topics. After checking the Austrian curriculum had yielded no satisfactory results, the books were compared in order to find topics, as well as grammar points that would draw upon the students' previous English learning experience.

Once the topics had been found, the material research period started. As can be seen in the time sheet (see Appendix 14.0.2), this period took the longest to be completed. The reason for this is that during the research period, the material discovered, predominantly yielded results that did not contain OER material.

In addition to using the websites found during the project seminar, Google was used in order to find results. The reason why Google was used was in order to create a realistic setting of search results because, as seen in the study conducted by Banzato ( 2012) over 70% of the teacher questioned used this search engine in order to find teaching material online.

Due to the unsatisfactory results, the Creative Commons search engine was used. ("CC Search" 2016) This search tools allows uses to find material licensed under a CC license on various platforms such as Flickr, YouTube and Google. While the material found for the first two platforms was always released under a CC license the same cannot be said for the results of the later. When using the CC search engine with search terms such as "present perfect exercise", one would assume that the links found, while not necessarily relevant to the topic, would at least be licensed under a CC license. However, this was not the case.

A predominant amount of links found using this method included material with an "all rights reserved" copyright notice or featured "free" material as mentioned earlier. This led to problems because instead of being able to use material without having to worry about possible copyright infringements, each link needed to be rechecked individually with regards to its license. Therefore, the time needed in order to find suitable material licensed under CC increased.

While there was material released under a Creative Commons license, often times it was not clear, due to lack of citation, whether the base material consisted of OER as well. For example, some websites used pictures of celebrities or clips from Hollywood movies as part of their exercises. In order to avoid using possible copyrighted material, attention was paid either not use the material to begin with or to adjust it in order to remove potential copyrighted material. An example for this can be seen in both, the present perfect holiday card, as well as the shopping dialog exercise.

All of these issues as well as the fact that little material suitable for students' level and age group, more on this later, could be found which lead to a significant increase in time used during the research.

Once (semi)suitable material that could be reused and remixed had been found it new material needed to be created. During this time a variety of issues occurred with regards to Creative Commons licenses. These issues will be discussed further in the following chapter.

It should be noted that there were a variety of components that increased the time taken to find and create the OER material used. First of all, it would have been possible to look for material suitable for the age group and than decided on a relevant topic and grammar point. As stated at the beginning of the chapter this was not done because the author wanted to ensure that the material used would draw upon the students' prior English knowledge and in to ensure that the material would work well with the material the students usually used in class, i.e. the school book.

Furthermore, this was the first time the author had to create this many lessons and it was also her first time using OER material. Therefore, rather than being able to rely on past experiences e.g. with regards to which websites provided good quality material suitable for students and this particular age group and with this level, this was not the case. One of the reasons for this is that the preliminary study did not focus exclusively on material licensed under a BY or BY SA license but include all CC licenses. Due to the fact that during the preliminary study a major of material released under BY NC SA license had been used, said material could not be reuse for this study.

Therefore, it will be easier for more experienced teachers who already have used OER material to create lessons using OER material. Furthermore, if a similar study with students of the same age group and level would be conducted, the material could be reused. This means that the time needed to create the material will decrease because material could be reused with minor adjustments according to the class' needs. However, it is important to note that teachers using OER instead of school books might also run the risk of simply reusing material "as is" for years to come without said adjustments being made.

All in all it took the author about 39 hours to prepare the lessons.

As can be seen in the time sheet (Appendix 14.0.2) around 20 hours were spent trying to find suitable OER material online that could be used as a basis for the lessons. The first four hours of the research period were spent comparing school books as well as finding material relevant to the curriculum. This task would not be necessary for experienced teachers. The remaining 15 hours consisted of adjusting the exercises to suit the students' needs as well as licensing material under a CC license.

Despite all of these components that can be seen as reasons why it took so long to create the material, the results correspond with findings from Bliss et al. (2013) where a majority of teachers questions said they needed about the same or more time to create OER material when compared preparing their previous lessons.

Problems with Creative Commons

Throughout the study various challenges as well as discrepancies were encountered with regards to CC licensed material. The following chapter will talk about these instances in more detail.

One of said discrepancies was only discovered after the study was over. As a base for the grammar explanations, material from the ESLAU website was used. ("Mobile ESL | Athabasca Universityty" 2016) As seen in Figure 10, according to the Creative Commons icon, as well as the text below the material is licensed under a BY 3.0 license. At the end of the study, the link to the OER material was double checked in order to ensure that the material is still licensed under a Creative Commons license. This was done because, as mentioned in the chapter regarding the project seminar, a website with a changed license had been discovered earlier. Therefore, the ESLAU website was rechecked as well.

By accident it was discovered that clicking on the BY logo led to a website featuring the terms of another Creative Commons license, namely BY NC SA 3.0. This led to some confusion since no other indication for a license other than a BY 3.0 license had been discovered. Additionally, when clicking on the hyperlink provided in the text, a link to the terms of the BY 3.0 version was provided.

Due to the fact that the material had already been produced and the predominantly used license on the website is BY, the reference to this license was kept intact. However, when reusing the material in the future, it would be best to contact the site's host in order to avoid any misunderstandings and ensure that the provided license is correct.

The reason why the material was rechecked after the study was over, was to ensure that the material used was still released under a Creative Commons license. While a Creative Commons licenses is irrevocable ("Frequently Asked Questions -Creative Commons" 2016) that does not mean that it cannot be removed at a later point in time. However, if a website released material under a Creative Commons license and a user has obtained said material at a point in time when the license was still present and valid, the user is allowed to use the material according to the initial licenses agreement, despite the fact that the CC license has been removed. Therefore, once something has been released under a CC license it becomes difficult to stop the material from being distributed since users who obtained the material at an earlier point in time are still allowed to redistribute it.

Another confusing situation regarding a CC license occurred with regards to a website called elllo.org. As seen in Figure 11, the website has a reference to a Creative Commons license.

It is stated that: "The mp3 files and text on elllo are Creative Commons. Students and teachers are free to download, copy and distribute these materials for educational purposes. They are not transferable for commercial purposes." ("English Listening Lesson Library Online" 2016) However, no further mention regarding which Creative Commons license used is provided. Similarly to how "Text: Creative Commons" is an "incorrect attribution" according to the CC website, ("Best practices for attribution -Creative Commons" 2016) this can be seen as an incorrect way to license material under a Creative Commons license. ("Marking your work with a CC license -Creative Commons" 2016) In addition to no license being directly mentioned, there is no Creative Commons license that corresponds with the "for educational purposes" part stated above. Since modifications to CC licenses are not allowed to be labeled as such ("Modifying the CC licenses -Creative Com-mons" 2016), it was important to determine whether the material was in fact licensed under a CC license or not.

Therefore, in order to find out how to properly credit the source and to determine under which Creative Commons license the (re)used material had to be released, the webmaster of the page was contacted. On October 5th 2015, the author contacted the webmaster with the following message:

"Dear Mr. Beuckens, First of all I would like to thank you for providing such great online material for EFL students and teachers alike. I want to use some of your material for a class I'm teaching, however, I am having difficulties finding how to properly credit your website.

It is stated that: The mp3 files and text on elllo are Creative Commons. Students and teachers are free to download, copy and distribute these materials for educational purposes. They are not transferable for commercial purposes.

However, this is the only reference to Creative Commons so I'm not sure what the proper license to cite would be. Please kindly inform me under which Creative Commons license you have released your material so you can give you proper credit.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Kind regards, Maria Haas"

The message was sent using the contact form of the elllo website and the author's email address was included. The author would have preferred to email the webmaster directly, however, no other contact details were provided on the website. It should be noted that no reply was ever received.

In this case it seems clear that the webmaster wants to enable teachers to use the material he provided. However, the fact that no concrete CC license was used makes it difficult for the website users to find out how to give proper credit. While the explanation is there that does not mean that the work has been released under a Creative Commons license.

As mentioned above, the CC website provides the licensers, as well as the licensees with rules regarding how material is supposed to be cited. A lot of the rules, with a few exceptions can be bent depending on the particular type of media that is being cited. However, the name of the license the work is released under has to be present at all times. This can be seen in the license chooser ("Choose a License" 2016) were the name as well as the link to the license is always present.

It should be noted that at the time of the study (October 2015) the website with the most recently released lessons featured the above mentioned statement. However, upon revisiting the website in January 2016 it was discovered that sites with newer lessons did no longer include the above mentioned license notice. Instead it was replaced with "elllo production" ("English Listening Lesson Library Online" 2016) . It should be noted however, that the previous license statement can still be found under some of the earlier lessons. Due to the fact that no reply was received, it is unclear whether or not the change of licensing was made because of the message sent by the author.

The last license related problem encountered during the research had to do with license compatibility. As mentioned in the chapter regarding Creative Commons, the SA module is one of the main reasons why certain CC licenses cannot be used together. In this particular example, it was not related to an incompatibility with regards to two different licenses but rather different versions of the same license.

The material used as the base for an comparative exercise used in the third lesson was released under a CC BY SA 4.0 license. However, due to the fact that this exercise compared outdated PDAs, it needed to be updated to be relevant for teenage students in 2015. Therefore, it was decided to replace PDAs with current generation smart phones in order to make the exercise more relatable to students.

For this purpose Wikipedia articles of three different smart phones were used to obtain technical data. While it would have been possible to make up fictional information regarding the phones, in order to keep the exercise authentic, real data was used. Additionally, since the author mentioned to the students that she wanted to buy a new phone, it would have defeated the purpose if fictional data had been used. Furthermore, pictures needed to be provided and were obtained from various websites.

However, while assembling the exercise it was discovered that while each individual part of the exercise, i.e. the base, as well as the texts and pictures, were released under either a BY or BY SA license, the version number of the BY SA licenses differed. This led to a problem because of the SA restriction. The reason for this is that according to the Creative Commons website, the BY SA license:

"lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Due to the discovery of this compatibility list, the exercise could be created and was released under a CC BY SA 4.0 license since all earlier BY SA versions, except for 1.0 as mentioned above, are compatible with the latest version. In addition to that, all material created for the study using CC licensed material was released under either BY or BY SA 4.0 license.

These examples show that because CC license difficulties were encountered. In addition to finding the best way to properly license material situations like the ones mentioned above led to a large amount of time being spent to credit CC licenses.

A predominate amount of time during the "prepare lesson" sections noted in the time sheet were spent dealing with CC related issues. Therefore, at least in the case of this study CC licenses significantly increased the preparation time.

This shows that in order for OER material to be actively used in an EFL classroom, teachers need to be educated about how to properly work with CC licenses in order to decrease preparation time.

Finding Material

At the time of the study the students had been reviewing the past simple. Initially the topics chosen for the study were shopping and traveling/foreign countries while the grammar focus was supposed to be on the comparative and superlative forms. Additionally, the students were supposed to review the tenses they had encountered thus far, i.e. present tense, past simple, will future/going to future, over the course of their English lessons.

However, one of the English class teachers approached the author, asking for the present perfect simple tense to be included in the lessons. The reason for this was that the teacher felt that due to the students' relatively high English level a grammar review was not needed.

As seen in the school books sighted for the study (Gerngross et al. 2009;Baer-Engel and Haß 2010;Weber and Westfall 2005) it is common in Austria to introduce the present perfect simple tense in the 6th form or the second year of study. However, usually the students are introduced to this tense at a later part of the first semester or during the second semester of their second year in middle school.

The present perfect tense is one of the more difficult aspects of English to master for German speaking students. According to Swan and Smith (2001) there are a variety of reasons why their native language is interfering with the correct usage of present perfect. The first reason for this is that while in German a form similar to the present perfect exists, its usage is different because it often acts as a another form of the past tense. Additionally, in German the past tense is used for contexts where English native speakers would use the present perfect tense. (Swan and Smith 2001) Therefore, German EFL students often have difficulties differentiating between present perfect simple and the past tense. Furthermore, in German when asking questions using "how long", e.g. "How long have you been here?", the present tense would be used. However, as seen in the example, English speakers use the present perfect tense. (Swan and Smith 2001)

As mentioned in the section Preparation, it was difficult to find suitable material due to a lack of proper license. In addition to that other problems with regards to obtaining material occurred.

Problems with Material

In addition to the problems encountered due to the Creative Commons licenses, there were other problems with regards to licensing in general. For this purpose it is important to distinguish between open and free material. "Free English material" that can be incorporated into the EFL classroom is easy to find. A simple Google search is sufficient to find thousands of "free" teaching material. However, upon further inspection, it becomes apparent that the material might be free as in available at no cost, but not necessarily open. Often times these materials are labeled as "for educational purposes only" and feature stipulations that allows for printing only. This means that edits to the material are prohibited. However, during a study condcucted by Pulker and Calvi (2013) the teachers involved did not leave material "as is", but preferred to edit and add to the material in order to make it fit the individual students' needs.

One of the aspects that is important to note is that in order for material to be used as OER, the building blocks used to create the resource need to either be created by the author, released under a Creative Commons license or need to be released in the public domain. This was one of the issues encountered over the course of the study.

It should be noted that due to the particular nature of the study, not a lot of material that could be reused was found in repositories. Initially, it was believed that repositories with EFL and ESL material could easily be found. The reason for this was that OER material is predominantly being produced in English or by institutions situated in either the US or Europe. (Amiel 2013) However, due to the fact that OER material is currently mainly being produced for the tertiary sector, the intended audience is either native English speakers or non-natives with a high degree of English. Therefore, material for EFL, and in particular for students with an A1-A2 level could not be found.

Language learning material for beginner learners of other languages, in particular Romance languages such as French, Italian and Spanish, could be found in repositories such as OpenLearn.

("Open Learning -OpenLearn -Open University" 2016) While it is possible to reuse and adopt an exercise initially created to learn one language in order to learn another (Winchester 2013), the material found could not be used. The reason for this is that the author is not able to speak a Romance language, therefore adapting material created to study one of these languages was seen as unfeasible.

During the research period one repository was found which presented users with EFL material. The repository is the Dutch website Wikiwijs ("Start" 2016) The repository was created by the Dutch Ministry of Education ("OER Case Studies -Creative Commons" 2016) and provides its users with material ranging from primary school to higher education. It should be noted that the website also included material particularly designed for special needs students. While this was not the main focus of the study, it is nevertheless important to mention since OER material also allows special needs students to benefit from online material because it can be adopted to fit their individual needs. (Richter et al. 2014) Despite the fact that the website is entirely in Dutch, a language the author is unable to speak, it was possible to find and obtain suitable EFL material because some of the English learning material presented is available entirely, i.e. the exercises as well as the explanations, in English. This meant that English search terms could be used in order to obtain material. In one of the initial lesson plan, material used from one of the "star material" found in the repository was included. However, due to time constraints the exercise was not included in the final lesson plans presented here.

Furthermore, it was later discovered that despite the fact that the "star material" was said to be released under a CC BY SA license, some of the material included in the lesson were used according to "fair use" terms. ("Holidays and travel -HV2 -Lesmateriaal -Wikiwijsleermiddelenplein" 2016) This means that they were allowed to be used for educational purposes, however, it also means that the material was not 100% OER because, as mentioned above, fair use terms may not apply to the same degree in different countries in the world.

As mentioned previously, not a lot of OER repositories with material suitable for beginner EFL students could be found. Therefore, instead of rely on so called "big OER" material from "little OER" was used instead. (Weller 2010) According to Weller (2010) OER can be divided into two groups, big OER and little OER. (Weller 2010) The first group refers to repositories that are typically hosted by renowned universities and projects. "These are usually of high quality, contain explicit teaching aims, presented in a uniform style" (Weller 2010, p. 2) Little OER on the other hand refers to projects created by individuals and the material contained therein is not necessarily always related to teaching. (Weller 2010) In particular personal websites and blogs created by individual teachers were found to contain suitable material for the study. A drawback to using material from these sources rather than repositories was that material was not necessarily tagged with metadata, which meant that finding material within the website was more difficult.

The fact that teachers often are unaware of copyright issues leads them to commit unintentional copyright infringement. During personal talks with both English teachers it was often mentioned that they did not know whether they were allowed to use certain material in their teaching or not. In addition to that they assumed that providing a link to the source would be enough to reuse any material found for free online. While, as mentioned earlier, Austrian teachers are allowed to use copyrighted material in their lessons under certain circumstances, this lack of awareness can lead to teachers providing students a false sense of security when it comes to using material released under a "all rights reserved" license. Klimpel (2012) also refers to this false sense of security with regards to material licensed under a CC NC license. While school can be seen as a safe place where using NC material is allowed, the same cannot be said in an out of school setting, for example with regards to sharing material on social media platforms who tend to act in a commercial matter. (Klimpel 2012, p.18) Another reason why it may be difficult to find OER material for secondary education might be the fact that teachers are sharing covertly. Instead of sharing material freely online, the sharing often takes place in an internal setting where only a limited number of people have access (Richter and Ehlers 2010; Comas-Quinn and Fitzgerald 2013), e.g. through means of email or school networks. As stated by Richter and Ehlers (2010) teachers often assume that making the material available online is enough in order to allow their colleagues to use the material. In addition, in a study where academic staff members were questioned regarding their willingness to share their material, over 60% (n=33) answered that they preferred sharing with colleagues they closely work with. (Rolfe 2012) One of the reasons why material is shared this way has to do with trust. Due to the fact that, as mentioned above, teachers are often unaware of copyright related issues (Richter and Ehlers 2010), sharing in this close knit setting allows them to do so, seemingly without having to worry about possible copyright infringement. In turn, this means that less OER material that could be shared and be useful for a larger group of people thus is hidden in password protected networks. (Sawyer 2008, p.4) In addition to that, while teachers are using OER material, only few of the reused material is being shared back to the community. A group of teachers in Italy was asked about whether or not they would share their own teaching material in an open repository online. Only a little over 18% (n=32) answered that they would make the material available without restriction while over 50% (n=92) would share material if some entry restrictions where available and almost 30% (52) would not make their material available at all. (Banzato 2012) Clements and Pawlowski (2012) also discovered that while only minor barriers with regards to the first four stages of OER reuse,i.e. search, evaluate, adopt and use, could be found, while the last stage, i.e. the sharing, was seen as the most problematic. The reason for this is that teachers are more familiar with the first four stages since they are accustomed to using these methods in their daily teaching lives. The three major barriers found during the Clements and Pawlowski's study with regards to sharing own material online were curriculum incompatibilities, copyright issues as well as subject variations between different countries. (Clements and Pawlowski 2012, p.6) Clements and Pawlowski (2012) also found that teachers preferred using material created in their own country. The reason for this is that this ensure that the material used is relevant to the curriculum used in a particular country. This was also relevant to the current study because during the research and lesson creating period, initially material created by either Ger-man or Austrian teachers were sought out in order to ensure above mentioned compatibility. However, no such material that was useful and relevant with regards to the topics discussed during the lessons was found. When material fitting this criteria was discovered however, it often employed a more restrictive CC license (e.g. BY NC SA), included material that could not be identified as 100% OER (e.g. usage of celebrity pictures) or was released under an "all rights reserved" license.

Using local material instead of material produced in other countries also corresponds with the growing need for localization.

("Thoughts from the Hewlett Open Ed Grantees Meeting" 2016) While it is important that preexisting OER material can be reused and remixed in order to create new material, it is also important to local produce OER. ("Thoughts from the Hewlett Open Ed Grantees Meeting" 2016) Rather than becoming mere consumers of OER it is important to spread the word and make people actively produce it. This is not only important in developing countries but all countries all over the world. It should be noted however, that according to Sinclair et al. (2013), producing material for a specific cultural community can be seen as "the "Reusability Paradox" in a slightly different guise: The more contextualized and targeted the resource, the more useful for teachers in a similar context but the more difficult to repurpose for others." (Sinclair et al. 2013, p.184) Similar discoveries to this paradox could be found over the course of the study. Material that was too closely linked to a specific context would have needed to be changed significantly in order to be reused in a purposeful manner. Therefore, material that was more general and relevant for students in a variety of contexts was chosen. This is also one of the reasons why pictures were one of the most used resource throughout the study. For example, during the British and American lesson pictures were chosen because they not only helped students with associating words to a mental picture, instead of having to rely on translation, but they can easily be used in a different context.

As stated earlier, some of the base material used during the study was not seen as being 100% OER, for example with regards to the present perfect postcard exercise. Therefore, the material needed to be changed because the author was not sure about whether or not all material was licensed under a Creative Commons license.

The reason for this is lack of trust with regards to the original author and their credibilities.

Trust in general is a very important issues when it comes to reusing OER. According to Clements and Pawlowski (2012) trust is directly associated with the perception of quality. Particularly in the search and evaluation phases trust influences whether teachers reuse material or not. (Clements and Pawlowski 2012, p.9) This corresponds with the finding of the current study. For example, since the website of Burns (2016) includes a pictures as well as a digital CV of the author, the material produced by him was considered to be trustworthy and e.g. the picture included in the reading exercise was kept as is instead of replacing it with a different one. Other teachers had similar responses, such as when material was uploaded by others associated with renowned institutions. (Clements and Pawlowski 2012) As mentioned in this chapter, there were a variety of reasons why no suitable material could be found. This is also one of the reasons why material seen as (semi)suitable, i.e. material that included possible copyrighted material, was used. An example for this the postcard exercise in the fifth lesson. In addition to that the author created a lot of material herself because no suitable material was found.

However, as noted previously results might have been different had no prior selection of the topics and grammar points taken place.

Limitations and Future Research

Due to the relatively small sample group and the limited time frame of the study, a few limitations need to be considered.

The results found and presented in this study with regards to preparation as well as students' feedback should be taken with a grain of salt. One of the reasons for this is that the author is not as experienced with teaching and preparing lessons due to her lack of work experience.

During the study, the students appeared to be engaged and interested in the material presented. It should be noted that part of this might be related to the fact that the material was presented by a different teacher. Therefore, in order to get a better understanding of whether or not students are more engaged and interested because of the OER material rather than the teacher themselves, it would be good to conduct a similar study where the material is created by the "regular" teachers themselves.

In addition to that, had the group been split in two it would have been possible for one of the groups to act as a control group for the other. That is to say that while the subject matters would have been the same, one group would be taught using their school book as well as other materials generally used by the teacher, whereas the other group would have been taught using exclusively OER material.

Due to the limited time period during the study it was not possible to determine the long term effects of OER. Therefore, while finding the material was considered to be the most time consuming aspect of the preparation time over the course of the study, this might no longer be an issue in the long term. Since with more teaching experience to draw from it becomes significantly easier for teachers to reuse their own material created over the course of the years. Furthermore, once the "groundwork" is laid and certain repositories or material providers are considered to be useful, it becomes easier to find new material.

Another aspect that was not considered during the research period were parents. Since particularly in primary school parents are often actively involved in the learning process of their children, they often rely on tutoring centers and schools to provide them with material. (Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens and Books on Demand GmbH 2015) The same can probably be said about lower secondary school. This means that they are particularly prone to copyright infringements due to lack of awareness. Therefore, it is important to not only make teachers and students more aware of OER as a whole and its benefits but to also educate the parents.

Conclusion

Open Education Resources are a great opportunity for teachers to increase the quality and enjoyment of students. As could be seen throughout the study, the students enjoyed working with the material and where eager to learn. This suggests that students would not be opposed to using OER material in class instead of using their school books.

However, the study also showed that while it is possible to exclusively use OER material in an EFL setting in an Austrian school, at the moment there are certain challenges encountered when doing so. Therefore, in order for OER material to be used on a regular basis in an EFL classroom in Austria, certain changes need to occur.

While it is possible to use OER material in an offline setting, there are certain drawbacks associated with it. In addition to the paper used to create hardcopies, citing creative commons material became more difficult and confusing due to the offline setting.

Further research needs to be conducted in order to determine if measurements such as providing material online could decrease the time needed to prepare the lessons.

Furthermore, it is important to spread awareness of the OER movement as a whole in order to make teachers aware of its benefits. Doing so will stop teachers from sharing material in a private setting and allow a larger audience to benefit from the material created by others. Therefore, the author suggests implementing a course with regards to OER usage as a requirement in the curriculum for teacher training in order to allow the future generation of teachers to learn about the benefits associated with using OER material and provide in introduction to OER usage.

Comparative/Superlative

Wenn wir Dinge oder Personen miteinander vergleichen wollen, verwenden wir die comparative Form.

• This coat is cheaper.

Wenn wir drei Dinge direkt miteinander vergleichen wollen, verwenden wir than.

• This coat is cheaper than the other one.

Randy and the new car

One day, Randy decided to buy a car. With a car, he could carry a lot of garbage and take it anywhere he wanted. He went to the car dealership and asked about the best car for him. "This is strange," Randy thought, "There's no garbage and it's louder here than usual. He looked at the fourth can and he saw a big truck next to it, lifting it up in the air with robot arms. When the can got very high, the garbage fell out of it into the back of the truck. Inside the back of the truck was more garbage than Randy had ever seen before! "Wow!" he thought, "This is the best car I have ever seen because it can carry so much garbage."

He went to the driver and said, "Excuse me. Can I bother you?"

"What do you want?" asked the driver.

Present Perfect

Wir verwenden das present perfect wenn wir über Erfahrungen sprechen die wir in unserem Leben bisher gemacht haben. Dinge die wir getan und erlebt haben. Der Zeitpunkt wann das passiert ist, ist egal.

5

to decide: sich entscheiden car dealership: Autohaus van: Lieferwagen jeep: Geländewagen crash: Unfall shiny: glänzend foil: (Alu)folie to bother: stören, nerven for sale: zu verkaufen Comprehension 1.

Appendix

10.1 Material used in class