With this e-textbook, we fulfilled a long-time dream of writing our own beginning German language textbook. Inspired by a workshop on Open Educational Resources by the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alberta, we decided to write our textbook as an OER to provide students interested in learning German with pedagogically-sound, current, and freely accessible educational materials. In addition, we designed this e-textbook in a blended-learning format to address students’ scheduling issues and to allow them to take a more self-regulated approach towards their own learning by completing the online lessons at their own pace.

We are grateful for receiving the University of Alberta Open Educational Resources (OER) Grant from CTL and for some financial support from the Provost.

We would also like to thank our wonderful former and current students who inspired us to take on this enormous task. We are especially excited that we were able to feature some of you in our audiovisual materials. You made our e-textbook come alive!

And very special thanks go out to our amazing friends in Germany who are featured in our e-textbook. Thank you for sending us photos, videos, and audio-recordings whenever we sent an email asking for yet another thing!

We hope that students and instructors alike will enjoy learning and teaching German with Willkommen: Deutsch für alle.

The Authors

Claudia Kost and Crystal Sawatzky