The California State University, Northridge Freshman Seminar (U100) program includes a Community-Based Learning component. The sudden shift to online learning at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 meant that existing in-person relationships for this purpose were no longer viable. Special Collections and Archives collaborated with U100 faculty to provide a viable online option to fulfill this requirement. The English Language Learner Oral Interview collection is one of several projects produced by that partnership.

Professors Elena Miranda and Debbi Mercado created a class assignment instructing their students to "interview people of different ages to find out what it is like to be an English learner in an English-dominant world.”

The collection consists of thirty-two interviews conducted with friends and family. First languages include Spanish, Tagalog, Arabic, and Japanese.