Using OERs in Emergency Distance Language Learning: a case study

The Covid-19 pandemic forced us to reconsider the entire higher education system and offer distance education. However, lecturers at the University of Torino had an advantage over their colleagues, since the University had already launched a series of open online courses in the academic year 2018-2019 with the Start@unito project, aimed at both prospective students and first-year students. This paper focuses on Modern Language courses. The aim of our research is to understand if and how the Start@unito Open Education Resources (OERs) have been integrated in Emergency Remote Education (Bozkurt, 2020) to promote learner autonomy in achieving the required level in the 4 linguistic competences (listening, reading, speaking, writing). Though limited to a relatively small number of respondents, our research can be considered a reflection based on experience to integrate and enhance OERs as an additional resource for teachers and students to encourage learner autonomy.