Winner 2025 - Learning Russian through films.
Open Research objectives/practices
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Capitalizing on unique open aspects of open educational resources.
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Promoting and facilitating Open Research and Education practices
Introduction
Our open textbook Learning Russian through Films is the first of its kind published by the University of Groningen Press. It incorporates evidence-based and theoretically driven pedagogical insights developed in our own department of Language Learning at the University of Groningen. It combines task-, content- and film-based learning approaches, contextualised via films depicting Soviet everyday life in the 1950-1980s. As learners (re-)watch these film episodes repeatedly, they are (re-)exposed to authentic Russian language and learn gradually without an explicit grammar focus.
Pre-tasks introduce key vocabulary and essential aspects of Soviet daily culture, while the final tasks encourage students to apply and personalise their understanding of the content via recording vlogs, role-playing and impersonating film characters in spin-off scenes.
Motivation
This textbook, accessible to anyone interested in learning Russian across the globe, was principally designed to be useful to instructors and students of Russian language. In the current world, where travelling to Russia has become almost impossible and access to unbiased insights into Russian everyday life is very difficult, our OER enables learners to experience authentic language in real contexts and learn about Russian people and culture. The film gives students a “window” to everyday life and everyday Russian people, so they discover people in Russia have humor too and are not so different from non-Russians.
The electronic format allowed us to link to audio and video material that would not be otherwise accessible. The emergence of the Open Educational movement has provided a network of platforms and practices to allow a text like this to be used all over the world.
Lessons learned
We would not want to have published this textbook in any other way. Unfortunately, copyright issues did not allow us to incorporate as much film as we wanted. Instead, we managed to creatively use short snippets and put links to the whole movie.
We also learned that real commitment is necessary between co-authors. One was from Russia, the other from Ukraine, and despite the fact that the Ukrainian author no longer teaches Russian, she has helped the Russian co-author, who fell sick, finish the project. Because of such issues, our book has not been launched as well as it could have been.
The completion of this project could also only have happened in the right environment, with the right kind of support. We are particularly grateful to the Open Education team at the University Library and Educational Support and Innovation, as well as the University Groningen Press.
As a whole, our Open Textbook is a true example of OER as a bridge-builder -during the process of its creation and now that it is open out in the world for anyone who wants to learn Russian through experience with authentic language use through films.