Open Educational Principles in Practice
Transforming Texts: An Interactive Edition of Português para principiantes
Português para principiantes is an introductory textbook for students of Brazilian Portuguese, and it has a storied history at UW-Madison. The text has been revised multiple times since its initial composition over fifty years ago. In its current, formative-assessment-rich form, it has provided interactive learning opportunities for students and inspiration for a wide range of instructors within and beyond UW-Madison.
In addition to serving as a model of an interactive open text, the Português para principiantes project highlights opportunities for OER creators and adapters to draw upon existing textbooks and transform them into shared resources that can benefit students and instructors in new ways.
The first edition of this book was originally written by Professor Claude E. Leroy in 1964 and was published in two print volumes by the University of Wisconsin Extension Division. Severino J. Albuquerque and Mary H. Schil revised the text in 1993. In 2016, Professor Ellen Sapega and graduate student Jared Hendrickson saw an opportunity to revise the textbook to incorporate additional interactivity.
Stay tuned for the rest of the story! We’re hoping to reach out to the collaborators involved in the project’s reinvention in order to learn about:
- how they worked with the Board of Regents to release this content as an open textbook
- the pedagogical decisions they made as they composed interactive content for the project.
OEP@UW Project Collaborators: If you are a project editor and are logged into your UW account, you should be able to view and edit the working draft/collaborator notes for this page directly in our shared drive. You may need to switch which Google account you’re working in to ensure your access permissions are recognized.
