Okay, welcome everybody. Thank you so much for being here. This is the first live session of the OER, sorry, the Open Education Global Online Conference. As you know, this year we are focusing on the UNESCO OER Recommendation Action Areas. This one session, this first live session, it's all about building capacity. So it's ways the global open education community is advancing capacity to create access, reuse, adapt and redistribute open educational resources. We have five presentations planned for this lovely live session this morning. And this morning, so without further ado, I'm going to pass the floor to Jacques Dan and his colleagues who will be talking about, give me a second so I can read the title. Actually, I can't find it straight away. So you could, Jacques, just go for it. Share your screen please. I think it's actually Turun who is starting, so I'll hand it over to Turun. Oh, okay, sorry about that. Thank you very much. So welcome to this session on a course on OER and Creative Commons licensing for capacity building. I will share my presentation and my colleagues will join later. I'm here. I'm Turun. I'm from Oslo, Norway, where the Secretariat of ICDE is hosted. And I'm here together with my colleague Anaïs Malkin, who is a senior advisor and also coordinator for a project that we will shortly introduce to you. For those of you who are not familiar with ICDE, so we're the leading and oldest global membership association for open flexible distance learning. We created back in Canada in 1938. So we have a long and proud history. We are a global not-for-profit NGO and we are hosted and partly funded by Norway since the 80s. And we've been in a formal consultative partnership with UNESCO since the 1960s. So what we do is we connect members and partners all across the world. We have members in more than 70 countries in all the world regions. And these members are higher education institutions, vocational technical institutions, and also individual members, experts and student members. And together with our members and partners, we are reaching out to over 15 million students across all continents. ICDE has been involved in open education for a couple of decades through our members. Many of them are open universities and also obviously through our consultative partnership with UNESCO. Currently, we're having two major projects focusing on OER. It is the ANCOR project, which my colleague Rob from the Open University UK will present later in this session. And it's the ICDE Francophone OER project that we will be focusing on today with this course. And we also have a committee of ambassadors of OER, the OER Advocacy Committee, which is chaired by our board member Eba Ocean-Ilsson, who's also here today. And they will also join me later in this session. So ICDE is very much present here in this session this morning, which I'm very pleased about. And obviously, as Eba mentioned in the introduction, the OER Dynamic Coalition is really what we're focusing on today. And we should have had with us today also our colleague from UNESCO, Zeynep Rooglu, the program specialist from the communication and information sector. Unfortunately, she was not able to join. So I have quickly this morning included a couple of her slides into my presentation, trying to fit that in. So this is, here you see Zeynep's contact details from the communication and information sector. And I really just want to highlight that the UNESCO recommendation of OER is really the only existing normative instrument in the field of technology and education to date. It was signed by and adopted anonymously by all UNESCO member states in November 2019. So a very important step for everyone working for open education. And this recommendation, it has five action areas, which you can see now on the screen. And those are building capacity, developing supportive policies, ensuring inclusive and equitable access to quality OER and developing sustainability models. And the fifth action area is facilitating international collaboration. And here is the dynamic coalition that UNESCO initiated, and that many organizations and partners among them ICDE have been joining. It is to facilitate the international collaboration to support all action areas. So that was very quickly the link between the recommendation, the dynamic coalition and today's topic. Here is also a slide from Zeynep where you can see that this course, well this course that we will be presenting today. It's a part of the mapping of OER capacity building courses. And this was a course developed by OERU in New Zealand in English on OER and Creative Commons licenses, which now has been translated to French. And this has been done in collaboration between OERU, ICDE UNESCO and Université Numérique. So the rationale for UNESCO to support this is presented in this slide. So now I will hand it over to my colleague from the secretariat, Anais, who's also coordinating this Francophone Africa project for ICDE. I can just move the slides, Anais, whenever it suits you. I think it's easier this way. So please Anais, can you take the floor? Yes, thank you Turin. Hello everyone. And I will just go quickly through the background of the course that is the project, the Francophone OER project, coordinated by ICDE, in partnership with UNESCO and the Digital French University in Autonomérique. It came from a partnership between ICDE and the French Ministry of Higher Education Research and Innovation, which was a member of ICDE. And we realized that we had the networks that could really be key to support OER expertise within the Francophone world. And the participation and organization of a summit that took place in Paris in 2018, which was also in partnership with OER Global, which at that time was called the Open Division of Consortium, and set the ground to this need for a Francophone expert group within OER. And the opportunity to get our networks together to support what was at the time the preparation of the UNESCO recommendation. But then when it was approved by the whole mandate state in 2019, then to support the implementation. And then the group, the Francophone OER expert group was created with the participation, so the French Ministry of Higher Education Research Innovation, the French Digital University, the Commission for UNESCO, the UNESCO join also the Francophonie organization and the virtual universities of Senegal, Mali, and the Republic of Congo. Those members are represented. And then at the later state also the Francophone chair of OER, Colin de la Higuera, who's also very involved in the OER Global conference today. And we've met regularly and we agreed on a project to support the UNESCO recommendation, first in three countries of Francophone Africa, which was Mali, Senegal, and Congo Republic. But then it also came through other partnerships, which maybe I can explain in the next slide, Turin, the synergies of other initiatives that were led in the country. One of them, for instance, led by UNESCO Dakar in Senegal, which was also supporting the implementation of the recommendation. We felt the need to expand to more countries and then included Burkina Faso, Benin, Burundi, Gabon, and Ivory Coast in the scope. And we had the objective of the project was to connect at the national and national level stakeholders at the ministerial and education leadership level, so that they could agree on priorities in the region to implement the UNESCO recommendation. And we were focusing on the two objectives, two first objectives, first areas of the recommendation, which is capacity building and supportive policies. And so, with the project, we realized also with the discussion with UNESCO, with the expert group that there was a possibility of including other para-initiative to collaborate and to harmonize. And that we also had this course that was created by your year you and that needed translation so that it could be offered within the project, for instance, for the capacity building exercises within the countries and so UNESCO translated the course and within the expert working group. We supported with cultural validation, because not only the language is also that the references are relevant. And then the technical validation in this case, for instance, the legal context, the difference between civil law and common law in francophone and English speaking countries so all that's been something that's been taking by the French digital university and they will, Jack and Cal will explain it later. But so that's key part of the project, the cultural approach, and also to document this process so that it could be applicable to other languages. We are considering maybe at a later phase to replicate in other languages, Spanish, Portuguese, if we say, Portuguese in the African region, Spanish in other regions so that's also one of the ideas in this project. And the multi sectoral approach so it's the academical and politic, like ministerial level, try to put them in contact through workshop the first pilot workshop to place in June. And so that we identify the needs and the priorities in the targeted countries, and then the capacity building aspect of the project to identify needs and provide some tools. And the course that we present today is one of the tools that we have have been presenting to the partners there, and that they have themselves participated in the testing. And because we will be will be launched in the ICD virtual global week conference conference week at the end of October and so before the launching we had a whole session of consultation and testing of the tool to confirm the cultural validity of its content. And then, yeah so just to finish on maybe ICD so because also we have the first presentation so also take the chance to, to welcome you to the community. I invite those of you who are not members yet to become a partner to subscribe to our newsletter so that you know, much more about what we're doing today. We are advocacy committee the front of one project on complex projects. Follow us on the news, Facebook, Twitter on the social network on LinkedIn. The blog that we also have the ICD insider and the journal open praxis we just launched a new version of the, of the website for the journal so we invite you. Welcome to participate there is a call to public papers three times four times a year, and to read the content which is also on we are and and very relevant for this community. Thank you, you can also, if you have any questions after the session. So, welcome to take contact with us at the general email of ICD or directly with Torino. Thank you. And now, Jack and Carol unless. Yes, we'll give you more details about the actual French adaptation of the course. Welcome everyone so I'll say a few words before this presentation about the course itself that has been developed by Dr Wayne McIntosh at the foundation. He also has the chair for open educational resources in New Zealand. So he works a lot with UNESCO and within the scope of the or you initiative. The foundation has shared with the global community, a number of courses, many courses, in fact, and among these courses are set of courses which are called leader, meaning learning in the digital age for courses actually. And one of these courses focuses on the legal aspects copyright and creative comments licenses. So this is why is this relevant for the capacity building on aspect of the or our recommendation. I believe it's quite important for us within the scope of French speaking countries in Africa to have a shared understanding between the ministries of higher education, the governance of higher education institutions as well as the educators themselves about what they should be aware of when the course building content sharing content, both for non commercial purposes and other purposes. So this is a great content that was shared by the foundation and we are very glad to have been involved in the adaptation of the course and its integration into possible training and learning in French speaking African countries. So, I'll let the floor to Carol, who will introduce this work that we have done on the leader one or three courses, and just mention to that Carol and myself are in charge of international relationships at university in that she will tell you a few words about in just a few seconds. Carol. Hi. I'm going to speak quickly about the technical validation and French adaptation to this course about the year. The first time the University of New York is an association, she was founded in 2017 in order to simplify the landscape of digital initiative about open education in higher education in France. Digital universities are groups together in the University of New York. Each thematic digital university is dedicated to a specific disciplinary field, economic management, health and sport, science and injury, humanities, ecology and sustainable development and technology. So, in addition to this shared work in France we also have a number of international partners, of course IDCDE, Open Education Global, which we will be proud to become a sustaining member in next January, initiatives in Africa as well as a number of European Union funded projects. The University of New York collaborate with ICD and UNESCO and virtual universities and ministries in Western Central Africa to promote UNESCO where we can mission. And this partnership include a lot of partner and all the partners joined the group. We hope to. This course was, as I said, offered by Yoria Foundation, and it was extraordinarily well translated by the linguists at UNESCO. But further to this work, there needed to be a number of adaptation to the translated work, technical, legal. And this work has given us a number of lessons learned and given us an idea about how to replicate the work in other languages. First of all, the civil law versus common law of distinction. So, as you may know, there are a number of legal systems in the world. Most well known is common law for the Anglophone countries, the civil law countries that include both Spanish, French speaking countries as well as other countries such as Germany and Japan. And why is this important? Because there is a distinction, a distinct point of view with different starting point. Copyright starts with the right to regulate the right to copy a work and intellectual property rights in the civil law countries focuses more on how do you protect one more laws, more rights. And this translate into differences between the creative commons licenses, and it's using civil law countries because the creative commons law, creative commons license is non revocable. But the moral right of the author in civil law countries is also non revocable. These are continent wide distinctions with also distinction between regions, and also local adaptations. And there's also differences in between resolution of conflicts between judiciary norms and licenses between civil law countries and common law countries. So, we learned that it's important to have a well translated document to integrate adaptation of cultural issues such as currencies, examples, cultural backgrounds. Also to have a range of technology platforms with the open source world is had a great variety of platforms. And adapting ones to the generic legal system as well to specific frameworks, especially in the case of Africa, and also lower level regulatory frameworks, how do you adapt exploitation rights to the work contracts to statutes of civil servants. And all this work has been quite substantive, but it hasn't given us some enthusiasm to move forward with other languages. And if you can see the various initiatives we're working on, you can see that they represent various regional subsets, the UNESCO Sahel initiative for four countries, a wider initiative for the front performance world, countries which will with whom we work and also present in Africa, and also the great work done by the OER advocacy committee at ICD, which nicely complements the countries we're already working on. So the next steps are, we are going to have national and transnational workshops are the number of events in France, online, in Berlin, in Nantes, next May, and in Kigali also next May. So, I think I have just, I'm just on time and we would welcome any questions you may have at the end of this session. Thank you very much for your attention. Great. Thank you so much. For anyone who has joined, when we were started already, remember we're not taking questions after each presentation, we are moving them all to the last part of this session so do keep writing on the chat, your comments. I hope that you lose the chat when you see the screen of the presenter, remember that you can actually, the only thing you need to do is exit full view, if you exit full view you will get your chat back, at least that's what happened to me. So thank you Jack and colleagues, we're now moving to the second presentation for this live session, and I'm going to welcome Judith Fatala, and she's going to be talking about new systems for open access books. Judith, whenever you're ready. Okay, so I'm going to share my screen now. And I will go to my presentation. So can everybody see that okay. Yeah, okay. So I'm going to start my timer for 20 minutes and I'll try and keep pretty well to time. So this presentation will also be addressing capacity building from a somewhat different perspective. And I'm going to be talking about some of the new systems that the project that I'm working on is pioneering for open access books. And I'm sure some of you know that when it comes to open educational resources books, academic books are really lagging behind journal articles and other forms of research outputs, particularly in higher education in terms of availability. So that is what this project coping was established to address. I'm just going to see if I can move us over to this side it's great so I can see my slides a little bit better, so we can all see them a little bit better. So coping stands for community led open publication in the structures for monographs and I've put down there some of the links to the main project website, the project Twitter, and the open pub pub where you can see all the documents from the project so far the whole thing is an open project. And the remit of this project was to investigate, build and maintain the infrastructures that are required to sustain open access academic book publishing into the future. So it's an international collaboration between researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and other open access infrastructure providers. It was initially funded from November 2019 through to October 2022. But we're expecting an extension now through to April 2023, due to various reasons, which I'm sure you can all imagine some of the delays that everything is in through these past couple of years. And it's been funded by a partnership between works being funded partly by research England which is one of the main funding bodies here in the UK to Arcadia and from partners within our consortium. And you can see on this slide, some of the members of the partnership so so far we are looking to expand at the moment. So Scholar led is a group of leading open access publishers in the UK, Europe, in the US, you can see some of the various universities they are partnership with the British Library, which is which just is a revenue management system. So Scholar organises payment subscriptions for open access content, and I'll talk a little bit more about our partnership with them later on and some of the universities I am talking to you today from Lancaster University or remotely from Lancaster University and Coventry University Trinity College Cambridge are some of our other university partners. So first of all, before I get into the revenue and infrastructure management platform. I better tell you a little bit more about what coping is the whole project. So coping is divided into seven work packages. So I'm going to go back to work package two because that's what I'm reporting from today. Work package one is to do with managing and managing the entire and overseeing the entire project and doing outreach to potential collaborators. And it's initial remit was knowledge exchange and piloting alternative business models. So looking at the ways that publishers can make open access educational books available. The models, their progress now the model that they've set up settled on is one of the best that they're kind of helping to promote and and distribute is called opening feature, which is a model whereby publishers who want to become open access publishers and take subscriptions to their back this which is closed and then use that subscription to fund the publication of open access books into the future so it's called opening the future. But there's a whole there are a range of business models for open access books that don't rely on book processing charges because of all you know the issues within equity around book processing charges. So they're exploring all of those. Community governance is to do with how well how do you manage this this community around open access books cooperatively in it in an egalitarian way that also is kind of effective and efficient. And I do some work on governance as well specifically with regard to the revenue and management platform, building an open dissemination system is work package five. There are issues with the dissemination and distribution of open access books, because publishers don't often have the same sort of set ways of working and distribution and dissemination that major publishing giants do because they're often smaller and they have less stuff and they have less established ways of working and I'll come back to that with regard to that from later on with package six is concerned with experimental publishing. So, moving beyond the idea of the traditional hard copy monograph as an open educational resource and going into digital publishing, living books, liquid books, different ways of making academic books. Reuse and the and impact and then work package seven this is very important is to do with archiving and digital preservation of open access books because obviously they don't necessarily exist in the same stable form and want them to be maintained and findable into the future. Now I'll come back to the work package that I'm talking about today revenue infrastructures and management platform, and our remit is to build a commute build a collective and build a system on a platform through that collective to better manage the revenue and distribution and allow libraries and publishers to come together to fund away books. So what we're addressing is the fact that as away publishing becomes more popular in journals books are lagging severely behind major publishers already have the workflows for getting these books into libraries and it's hard for small open access publishers to access those library funding schemes. So we held workshops and interviews with university librarians, regarding the problems of access and making away books available, and they said that they often lack specific systems for discovery and some dissemination, the metadata can be poorly integrated and hard to find. So the way books that they are, and not being effectively accessed by institutions and libraries find it hard and time consuming to look at the different initiatives and know what to support and where. So what we need is a collective that values collaboration and cooperation over competition and genuinely open publishing models that don't necessarily rely on the book processing charges, which can just entrench the dominance of researchers and institutions that are already the hegemonic structures in their field and just cutting off access to publishing for less wealthy institutions and researchers. We want our model to be scalable, so that the network and scale up rather than forcing individual publishers to scale up and become an incorporate in ways they may not be comfortable with so we call it scaling small because we're, we want the model to be scalable rather than forcing the publishers to scale up. And of course, a mutually supported network for both an access book community. So, sorry, that's an I don't know why I said this is an old the side I'll come back to that in a sec. So, the open book collective is this new organization to address these issues and support and to provide a stable forms of financial support. An organization's mission should go up there. Sorry about that slight error. We're probably going to found it as a registered charity in the UK for legal reasons that make it easier to manage that way. It aims to be financially self sustaining by the time the project ceases funding, our partners already include just, which is the revenue processing management partner for the UK, and then lyricists in America to do the same work for us and key to this endeavor is the open book collective platform so the collective supports the platform. The aims of this platform are to maximize the distribution of away academic books and streamline the workflows that make them available in libraries, whilst building the publishing models that will keep education open in the future. So, we're going to make it easier for organizations including scholarly libraries to support open access, make it easier for them to understand and compare the different initiatives on offer to discover the range of away content available to see how these different initiatives align with the values and needs of their institution, subscribe to the membership programs that they offer. And we also offer this is very important metadata integration through this project called toad I won't have time within this presentation to follow up on that link to toad but you can do it later on. Toad is a system that ingest the catalog of publishers and then produces content comprehensive metadata for their books that is reasonable by the widest variety of metadata readers possible. And what we're doing then is supporting publishers with smaller medium sized and other initiatives to work together collectively such such as scholar led is working collectively. As stakeholders in our platform, we recognize as authors librarians consortiums universities, researchers publishers and infrastructure providers. All of these people are working together with the mission for sustainable away educational books, but obviously, they're going to have needs and demands that sometimes not entirely the same and our challenge is for all of these people to work together in an egalitarian way as a collective that meets everybody's needs through this platform. So we're offering this platform to discover access and support away monographs via high quality metadata and searchable catalogs that open to everyone, you don't have to sign up to search the catalogs. It offers a choice of flexible subscription packages, through which patrons who are subscribed can also participate in the governance and maintenance of the platform. On the other hand, this space for open access publishers and infrastructure providers to display promote catalog organize and access these library funding schemes that they may previously have been cut off from they may not have had the time to look into it they may not have had the established work flows to access them. And then everybody has network of networking opportunities with librarians, institutions and other end users and a customizable members space. So, right now, and I'm going to move us so you can see this a little bit, I wish I put this down there. So, this is very much a project in development. So don't take anything I'm saying today as set in stone. And, you know, we've got I'm going to invite you again to help us to participate if you want to meet the community needs. So this is very much a working document, but our current design set specs for the platform include a membership builder. So libraries can make their package in a kind of mix and match way. And then the ability to sign up at different levels. So you can make your package, check out what it'll look like. Get the price, get the quote for what that would be and then not buy it if you don't want to.  So as a publisher infrastructure provider you can sign in and view your, what you have on offer and what you're offering. And total integration as I mentioned before. And right now, the payment flow is looking something like this from the customer or the subscriber through the UK or us payment processor there's going to be European ones as well I don't know if I go to the UK one or not. Or directly to the open book collective and then through to the publisher or infrastructure provider. That's what it's going to look like. I don't have wireframes view yet wireframes will come if you follow us on Twitter or follow me on Twitter. What else have we learned. This is what our stakeholders have told us the platform should be guaranteed nonprofit, and it should remain so so that's going to be in our statutes of integration. It shouldn't be focused. Sorry, gone too far. How do I go back. It should be focused on individual titles, but offer a range of flexible subscription packages. Again. So it's unlike knowledge and latched or similar ventures in that way. It should be simple to use the main thing that librarians are telling us is that they don't have time to compare all these different initiatives and decide what's the support. So we already are meeting this idea of having support from local and trusted partners, and it should be collaboratively governed. Now, and you can get more detail on what else we've learned by following that link on the slide where it's part of our publication documents collaboratively governed. What's that going to look like. We're working on it. That is part of this challenge that myself and I enjoy the director of books is addressing with regard to the revenue management platform specifically and our colleagues in work package for obviously collaborating with us all the time on that we're going to be running some workshops on governance soon which I think will probably be open to everybody so there'll be more information on on invitations coming towards the end of autumn. But what we're thinking right now is that all stakeholder groups are represented at the level of this administrative committee at the top. So we're calling it a concentric and cooperative model with a soft higher up the component it's been a mouthful will probably change that soon. We might take out the word cooperative because that's got legal implications. But in the center here is the open book collective producers group. So these people publishers, infrastructure providers and collectors have a responsibility that libraries who are also part of the open book collective don't have. Ultimately, the library's responsibility is to keep up with a subscription that we hope they would also want to be more involved with governance and development of the platform. The producers group obviously have a legal responsibility to fulfill their commitments on producing content, all of whom then are represented at some level at the administrative committee. The platform sits at the bottom. Above that, we have the platform and membership management. Above that, we have the producers group and the libraries operator all levels around it and everyone is represented on the administrative committee. We are still working on this. It's not finalized as I say nothing I say today is taken to be set in stone. On that note, I would like to invite everybody with an interest in securing an equitable and sustainable future for open access books to connect with us and get involved in developing this platform, which we want to launch in beta version in 2022, probably spring 2022. So I am the research and outreach officer for WorkPackage 2. You can email me or follow me on Twitter there. The leads for WorkPackage 2 are Dr Joe Deville, and you can follow him at Joe Dev on Twitter. And Iveen Joy, who is the founding director of Puncton Books, one of our open access scholar-led publishers. Joe is also a scholar-led publisher. He's just an academic as well. And his press is called Matron Press and they're also quite a scholar-led. And you can follow her at Iveen A Joy or you know her at Puncton Books. And I've put our general links down at the bottom as well. And I think that is time. So thank you very much. Yes, exactly. Bang on time. So that's really nice. Let me just remind you since Judith was giving us all her contact details and all to her colleagues. Just a quick reminder, you can, apart from, you know, having this question at the end of the session, you can also ask questions and leave any comments for any of the presenters on OE Global Connect and that's when you can also cast their slides. So, you know, if any of you can thought about a question after this session, so we'll have to ask that. Go to OE to connect and that's what you're going to connect. Okay, we're going to move on to the next presentation and that is Rob Farrow from the Open University. He's going to be talking about innovating open education. So critical pathways, communities of practice. So thank you, Rob. The floor is yours. Okay, thank you, Bea. Morning, everyone. See a few familiar faces here today. For those who don't know me, I'm Rob Farrow and I'm a senior research fellow in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK.  Encore is the European network for catalyzing open resources in education. You can check out the website Encoreproject.eu. There's a few links that I'll put into the chat when I finished speaking. So don't worry about writing them down as I'm going. So Encore is a knowledge alliance funded under the Erasmus Plus stream. And there's quite a lot going on in the project, but three sort of headline goals are to support the uptake of OER in Europe to catalyze and share innovative and best practice across education and business, and to develop stakeholder communities of practice of various kinds and to harmonize activity around OER. These are the partners on the project. We have ICDE in Norway, DHBW in Germany, the Open University in the UK, UNEA in Spain, Knowledge for All in the UK, Jubel in Norway, they run the H5P platform, FPM in Italy, Instructure Global, who manage the Canvas really, and Dublin City University in Ireland. And in addition to the key consortium, we've got a much wider network of associated partners with various kinds, different NGOs, education interests, and people from business. Okay, so I just want to start off by giving you a bit of background about the project and why we're doing what we're doing. I'm not going to spend too long talking about the definition of OER because I think most people here will know. But just a reminder, and for anyone who's watching the recording who doesn't know, OER are educational materials that are either in the public domain or released under an open license that permits various forms of use, reuse, and adaptation, and enhance the freedoms of those who use them compared to proprietary resources. So this lets you do things like the five hours of OER. Again, I won't go into too much detail, but essentially the point is that you get new permissions to retain, reuse, revise, remix or redistribute educational materials of various kinds. So why are OER interesting? There's a body of research now that suggests that OER have positive effects on learning. There's like improved access to learning by reducing the cost. But they also allow more diverse input into how learning materials are created, and new ways of sharing those and building on those. There's also evidence to suggest that OER are in culture forms of critical reflection and pedagogical innovation. There's also more flexibility in the way that open materials can be used and distributed. And this extends to things like integration into learning management systems, but also stuff that's on the open web. And it also kind of adds some transparency to the way that educational materials are created and used. If you look at what's happening with OER in Europe, this is from the OER World Map, which it's not necessarily exhaustive, but it's the best picture that we have of what's going on. There's quite a lot of activity in Germany on this. That's partly because the map is based in Germany and how they collect data. You will see that there's activity across most of Europe, but it's quite irregularly distributed. There's actually nearly 1500 organizations on the OER World Map and hundreds of different services, projects and policies. But what you tend to find is that activity happens in clusters or silos. So people are often following open initiatives, but there's not a joined up approach across countries or across Europe as a whole. And in some ways this is partly what the UNESCO recommendation is supposed to address, right, is the greater harmonization of what's happening with OER in different countries in different regions. I think another important bit of context here is that COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into more use of online learning. But most of the time that's happening in a kind of crisis management way rather than through the systematic uptake of OER. So some of the ideas behind Encore include encouraging more innovation in business through using OER because there's very little use of open resources outside education. And then some of the things associated with OER in general about improving access and encouraging more lifelong learning, more generally supporting modernization and digitalization of higher education in Europe. And also to attempt to synchronize formal and non-formal learning by advancing new ways of recognizing how that learning has taken place, like micro-credentials and that kind of thing. So we're intending to address five key challenges. So the first one I've spoken about already in the sense of it addresses this idea that there's a fragmentation of OER stakeholders across Europe. So there are OER stakeholders, but they don't necessarily act in a coordinated and synchronized way. Another need that we address is the idea of interoperability between European OER repositories. So what often happens at the moment is lots of different repositories are out there, but they don't talk to each other very well. And so you can't do, for instance, a federated search of all the OER repositories at the moment. So there's a strategy work strand addressing that. Another need is around the lack of institutional strategies. Try to avoid talking about policies only because you can end up just sort of writing another policy that doesn't necessarily do anything. So there's also a strand here, which is about finding strategies that work across different sectors and stakeholders. There's a quality strand, which is all about trying to find the right quality assurance mechanisms for educational systems of the future. And we have another need, which is the idea that we need innovative approaches and business models based around OER. And that's the sort of area that I'll be focusing on today. So if you put this all together, the idea is, and we're thinking about this in terms of an ecosystem, rather than just here's some work packages. So it's trying to put forward and develop the idea that this is one big ecosystem. And you can see here in the graphic, we have the five needs around the outside. The four circles on the inner ring are, we call them circles, they're essentially communities of practice. And there's one around policies and strategy, one around innovation of business models, one around quality and one around technology. And so while we have various bits of work going on in the different work packages, the important element of this knowledge alliance is to develop these circle communities. And later on in the project, we have activities where we'll be sort of bringing these different groups together. So I just want to say some things around innovation and OER. There is this kind of prevalent idea that innovation happens a bit like the moment of Eureka with Archimedes in the bath, the moment flash of inspiration. Now you know how to do things differently. Now you've seen something that you can work with, but actually innovation doesn't necessarily happen like that. And it's much more about an ongoing process and culture and developing places where innovations can be applied and can become habits and routines and ways of doing things that are new. So when you think about using OER and open this more generally, it's difficult to be categorical about why people move in this direction because people's contexts are quite different. And Martin Weller has made suggestions along these lines that there's a kind of formal similarity between different instances of openness. So for instance, there's a digital component, there's a networking component, and there's an openness component. But they're often realized in different ways in different contexts. So when we talk about innovation and someone being empowered to do something differently in their own context with OER, some of the reason why things happen in silos is because they are very contextual and they don't necessarily get rolled out at scale. But at the same time, openness is growing. I'll say a bit more about that in a second. I want to just look briefly at some theories of innovation and how they might relate to OER. This is the task artifact cycle. It's, you know, what 30 years old now. This is the idea that there's a cyclical element to innovation. So we're always coming up with new tasks. That means we need to develop new artifacts or tools or techniques to meet those tasks. And this is an ongoing sort of process and it does capture something about the way that people develop new resources to meet a particular need. And in a way what we're trying to do with openness is to sort of capture those artifacts and make them shareable and usable by others. But this only gets you so far and understanding what's going on. Another influential theory of innovation is the diffusion of innovations. And so this graphic shows you the yellow line is overall market adoption and the blue line is the rate of adoption. So that's a sort of standard distribution. And the idea here is just that you have early adopters and laggards and there's a sort of staggering over time of how things come to market and get adopted. You might wonder where's OER in all of this. In the USA, which is arguably the place where there's been the most systematic adoption of OER to open textbooks. But you're looking at about 5% of market share K through 12. And that's pretty small really that's a quite small that would put, you know, anyone who's using OER in the States would definitely be an early adopter according or an innovator according to this way of looking at things. And in Europe, it's definitely lower in terms of overall market saturation, which indicates a lot of potential. I just wanted to say briefly something about the Garten hype cycle. You may have seen variations of this. It's a slightly controversial way of understanding how things come to market where you have this big sort of boost of interest at the start. A lot of it sort of marketing fluff. And sometimes, you know, thinking about 2013 the year of the MOOC and all that stuff, then we just only have 50 universities left by now and you know, if you're around in those days, then maybe you could relate to this. I think there's been a there's been a paper published recently it says no technology actually looks like this right in terms of this is this is an idealized curve. If you look in the trough of disillusionment. That's where you're sort of seeing about 5% adoption. So just before you get to the slope of enlightenment. So we'd be sort of around there so you've had the kind of initial hype. And now we're into the sort of plateau of growing and developing. I put that there mainly for interest rather than because I think that it's true, but it's an influential way of looking at how innovation happens and how it comes to market. Another approach which I think is important is the something called Samir substitution augmentation modification and redefinition. This is applied to education and educational tasks, and the idea here is, as you get new tools and technologies you're able to rethink tasks and rethink what you're doing. And this does map quite well on to open resources. So if you think about substitution, this is often the first step in moving towards we are you start replacing a proprietary textbook with an open textbook, for instance. And we can sort of look at how just to use the example of textbooks, look at how this looks when applied to the framework.  And the modification part is now you can do things that you couldn't do before like sharing the books for free, putting them online. And that leads to things like improving access and so on. Modification at that level, we get to do new forms of collaboration, for instance, or new supplementary resources that you couldn't do because the digital or whatever. And at the redefinition level is rethinking whether a textbook is even the right way of organizing curriculum. So I think this maps quite neatly on to our use. And I'll say why I think that's important in a second. So we're also looking at business models and I won't go into this in too much detail. But one way of thinking about this is that some businesses are defenders and they're all about protecting their existing market share. And some businesses are more like prospectors but they're about creating new markets, new approaches and new sources of revenue. So I'm going to be using more detail in the project. I wanted to quickly mention that a couple of years ago, someone published a sort of typology of our business models. And this also sort of maps onto the same framework. So one type is static. I'm not going to go into too much detail on these. This is essentially just putting your resources online. And it's sort of unsupported interactive. Next MOOC model where resources are online, but they're sort of structured and there's some automation. So there's some sort of support, but it's not really human. Dynamic, which is more sort of blended learning and using LMS is CMOOX and transformative, which is more kind of like going beyond that model into links with industry targeted training and education, new forms of efficiency and so on. Now arguably these four types also map onto that same framework quite well, substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition. So we're looking at these kind of things and trying to develop kind of typology of business models. And the idea will be to leverage the networks and the communities that we are in contact with to refine those networks and make effective value propositions. Just quickly, I think this is this idea of open innovation, which is not a sort of controversial idea. This is essentially the idea of a sort of transparent approach to business where instead of being very protective of your IP and your strategy, you have to share that stuff. And it's considered a bit controversial because, because, you know, where's your competitive advantage coming from. But it's much more along the lines of the prospector approach where it's about creating new markets, and new ways of doing things rather than protecting market share. And so thinking about what does that mean in practice. There are new markets emerging around things like authentication of learning recognition, which I mentioned earlier proctoring examinations and assessment generally quality assurance platformization and so on. So we're interested in exploring these new sort of opportunities for working across business and education and supporting that kind of innovation. So, I think there's much time left so I'm just going to quickly say what we've got coming up in the project. So we'll be doing more desk research around innovation and no we are. And the goal here is to develop a tool which can be used to evaluate instances of innovation. So to extract the interesting things and be able to describe innovation and comparable terms. And we'll also be sort of sharing showcases of good practice across business and education and new business models and value propositions. We are publishing every six months and innovation briefing the first ones online on the website, and we have our main kind of report next year. And I mentioned the circles. So we have circle events for this strand of work in September, next February, October, and then April 2023. And in 2023 will also have our main showcase coming out of the project here in the details of the upcoming circles. And that is two this week and two next month. And I strongly encourage you to sign up for those if you are interested in any of these areas. The more perceptive among you may have noticed that the first circle is today. It's actually half an hour after this session ends. I would never encourage you to duck out of an event as auspicious as we global, you would be welcome if you wanted to come along. The recording will also be available online. So that's another way to engage. One other thing to mention quickly is that as part of these circles with developing position papers. And so there's a draft position paper online, which will be discussing later today. In the chat, and you're welcome to comment on that draft and engage with the project that way. We'll say just encourage you to sign up for the circles and invite personal contacts that you know are interested in this kind of area to join us as well. And yeah, welcome to the network welcome to the community. And hopefully you'll come and share your experiences. Thank you very much. Thanks for do share the links on the on the chat because that's that's actually very interesting. There's a couple of comments on on the chat as you know, as thanks for thanks very much for well genius I proceed in the idea of having these frameworks and also Michelle cannot talk about the connection with community building but we can pick that up later on. I'm going to go straight to our next presenter who is the honey Aldo Senami, who's got the most wonderful title for her presentation, the rise of the cell this son leveraging all year and capacity building to promote access and openness in education. Thank you very much. And I'll be glad to share information about the Saudi sun. Thanks via for. Let me share this presentation. So I hope that everyone can see the presentation and set my timer to 20 minutes. And if I please remind me if I if I'm taking much longer time. Okay, so thank you everyone for attending this presentation and thanks for the only global for this opportunity to share information about the Saudi OER project. So a little bit about me I'm an associate professor of educational technology at Prince of Tambin Abdul Aziz University from Saudi Arabia. I worked as a vice dean of information technology and distance education and senior advisor for ministry of education and education and training evaluation commission. The research interest includes many topics including open education and innovation. As BM said, the Saudi sun, I'll give you some information about the name these the shams name is a short for at the Arabic. It's abbreviation for the Arabic Shaba catal Muad Saudi, which is the, the initials of Saudi open OER network. And there's an I believe an analogy that's the OER is something like the the sun that gives you the benefits without conditions, without any conditions. The sunlight you get it now open and unconditional terms. So shams is the main initiative of the national open education resources program. And it is the national platform that offers secure reliable educational resources for all students, teachers, faculty, parents, and interested people without the need of registration on shams. It's a national open education resource program it's a national program that aims in enriching the educational content and support education, and it seeks to find a sustainable back to partner partnership, and it has it. And it will contribute to providing more educational opportunities as one of its mission. As my colleague, Robert mentioned that the openness and additional resources has lots of potential in adding innovation indication, adding globalized and internationalized perspectives. It enhances sharing ideas, collaboration and national and international collaboration. It enhances meaningful engagement among students and structures. It's also a destination for social, economic and technology convergence of interests, and it also promotes access for educators and for everyone, and facilitates delivering and accessing knowledge. Again, as Robert mentioned the definition for the OERs according to the UNESCO definition it's any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or are introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone anywhere can legally and freely copy use, adapt and reshare them. So the UNESCO recommendations 2019 were built on building stakeholders capacity to create access and use, adapt and redistribute OERs, develop supportive policy and OER, encourage inclusive and equitable quality OER, nurture the creation of sustainability models for the OER and facilitate international cooperation. And of course the Saudi national resources platform adopts the UNESCO recommendations but for the presentation sake we'll discuss the building stakeholders capacity to create access and redistribute OERs. I'm trying to move to the next, sorry. So this is the Saudi digital network or OER network, and I invite everyone to explore the high potential of the Saudi national network that includes contributions from different institutions and individuals connecting people and ideas. There's lots of products, initiatives that stemmed from Shams platform, it's been rewarded lots of prestigious national and international awards. And I'm going to talk and give some details about the Shams, the Saudi OER network. So the Saudi resources network, as I said shortened to its first initials Shams or Sun in Arabic, it has more than 50,000 uploaded resources with 37,000 published resources, more than 50,000 resources in review cycle. It has more than 20, more than 268 and 854 Arabic OERs and 95 them from Saudi Arabia. It has more than 5,334 educational content, more than 25,000 courses, more than 12,000 activities and 3,000, sorry 37 videos, more than 1000 authors are contributing and participating in Shams, more than 50 institutions, more than 7,000 Shams ambassadors trained between the years of 2017 and 19, more than 50 workshops for more than 5,000 educators around the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. So as you can see, it's a very huge project that it's a mega OER maybe in the whole Middle East, serving educators and students in the Kingdom and internationally as well. So this is the OER master plan framework and the organizational structure. And as you can see here, there's the methodology and actions, the stakeholders and projects, the SWAT analysis and the outcomes expected, the incentives, how the monitoring and evaluating the members and contributors, the research and main indicators, and the goals linked with the sharing processes, the efficacy, the quality control, the awareness, the capacity building, access and funding. So the National OER program, it aligns with the ambitious Saudi, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's 2030 ambitious vision, which says that we will contribute in investing in education and training and support our people with essential knowledge and skills for future jobs and provide all Saudi individuals with good education opportunities by offering a variety of alternatives. So the policy and main vision of Saudi Arabia is to diversify knowledge resources and make it available for everyone. The National OER program also aligns with the sustainable development goals, including the fourth quality education, to provide inclusive and equitable quality education, provide lifelong learning opportunities for all, and maintain integrated mechanisms for sustainability. The main strategic directions of SHEMS is to create a culture of interactive open resources, standardized accreditation, sustainable partnerships, ensure a highly efficient budget investment and resources of resources, also provide equitable lifelong learning opportunities and effective learning for all. The main goals are the key goals of SHEMS is to enhance stakeholders participation in the enrichment of the educational content, enhance partnership with pioneering entities, regionally, nationally and internationally, support academics and students participation, both nationally and internationally through nationally developed quality framework. The four actions that SHEMS followed to ensure the execution of its plan is to eliminate any potential barriers or challenges, including financial or accessibility issues, provide free and open access resources for educators, students with easy sharing and dissemination of license, ensure effectiveness of investment and sustainability of public funding, create an environment of creative creativity and innovation that facilitates communication among all stakeholders. So to maintain the sustainability of SHEMS, SHEMS implemented a change management plan, supported by a business continuity action plan, provided a supportive team, recruited the change catalyst to achieve holistic design and implementation of education content of digital courses, and the early adopters as categorized by what Robert shared with us recently about early adopters through the change theory by Rogers. Also, one of the sustainability main factors was supporting the administrative and financial governance structures of the program and organizing the organizational mechanisms, regulations to disseminate, stimulate and increase participation in the program. The two main pillars that SHEMS was based on is openness and shareability. Regarding openness, SHEMS was initiated on the pillars of providing free access to content, freedom of search and browsing resources, download and share content, making the platform open for learners at any time. And the shareability includes the collaborative approach in content creation and enrichment, sharing and improving the quality of open content, ensuring collaboration with experts and connecting with educational institutions. So to add more details regarding this on the capacity building, so SHEMS ensured building capacity of internal stakeholders and staff capable of leading and managing the national OER project, including the administrative and management staff, and raising the human capabilities through training according to the program structure and task of necessary skills and the program implementation and administration. SHEMS also built a capacity of external stakeholders through the raising the skills, upskilling faculty members, educational leaders, supervisors and teachers. Also, the SHEMS platform provided training and digital content, authoring curating and leveraging OER skills. The approach that SHEMS followed to achieve its mission and goals, first through the access to SHEMS platform and enhance its application. And the goal was to ensure that all students and faculty with SHEMS has a membership to join the platform during the fourth quarter of 2017. Teachers were provided with membership during the second quarter of 2018. Second, SHEMS provided continuous content improvement and support with rich educational resources. In addition to a sustainable financial support for the operation, development and content enrichment. In addition, it's very important to mention that one of its main approach to maintain its sustainability and achieve its goals, SHEMS set the regulations for licensing policies for open educational resources and intellectual rights of authors. It's regulated the relationship with stakeholders with the open educational resources, ensured the implementation of proper mechanisms for utilizing appropriate OER license to enabling, replicating, modifying, compiling and distributing content. In addition to that, it ensured the adoption of policies and regulations for building OER from educational services. In 2019, the Saudi Resources Network were expanded to include all Saudi universities, general education directorates and training institutions. So among the main achievements of SHEMS program is the successful partnership with national entities including 16 universities and four ministries, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Communication Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resources and Economy and Planning, a partnership with the Education and Training Evaluation Commission, Public Administration Institute, Technical and Education and Training, Saudi Aramco, Saudi Digital Library, and the Saudi Research and Innovation Network, MAIN Network. In addition to that, there was a successful partnership with key private entities in e-learning and digital content including Daroub, Tattweer Holding and other entities, with international, very effective and successful international partnership with ICE, KME, EE2F, OER International Resources, Achieve, Creative Commons and UNESCO. And due to this successful administration management and partnership of the Saudi OER program, a major eight successful initiatives stemmed out of this project, including SHEMS platform that I just shared with everyone and invited everyone to login and explore the platform. The SHEMS Author, SHEMS Cloud, Rabih License, OER Distinguished Achievement Award, SHEMS Ambassadors, SHEMS SANA and SHEMS Certificate. And I'm going to talk a little bit about each one of these initiatives. So regarding the courses, there is more than 22 higher education fully online courses developed by King Abdulaziz University, more than 4,000 high quality education resources for K-12 from the Ministry of Education. There is the digital content repository. Also, there's the digital content design, which enables professionals and structures to develop content and aligning with instructional system content, also providing social communication content and more than 110,000 Creative Commons license photos. Also provide the tools for knowledge creation and dissemination, including voice recognition technology, hotspot pictures, answers, guessing, Twitter feeds, video and audio chatting, compatibility with all our international standards, compatibility with metadata, the LMS, IMS and other products. Also, there's the SHEMS Cloud technology of indexed resources with keywords and descriptive data information, including the title, author, educational content type and license type. And all contributors were provided with good practices, training to upload the shareable content. And also, the SHEMS Cloud provided technical support to the team. Also, there's the SHEMS training, which is a professional licensing through gamified training program of six levels. And each level ends with Rabih or in English champion of knowledge with no boundaries license. That includes the training programs. It consists of OER future and structure basic and advanced with specific prerequisites on digital knowledge and skills. And I'm going to talk a little bit about each program that has its specific topic offering OER knowledge skills and values. So, number one and two, there's the program training program for OER best practices and SHEMS platform features and tools. There's the knowledge and skills training on design and creation of multi educational media. Number four, SHEMS author portfolio. Number five, preparing structures on the courses and design skills, technology implementation in education. So all these were upskilling training workshops were members and contributors. The SHEMS training included as well instructional and training materials. Training on creative commons rules and regulations, authoring and publishing rights, creative commons building blocks, creative commons usage and license publication. Creative commons for educators and for teachers and for OER for everyone. Number of trainees reached 7,000 members of Rabih license, more than 200 training hours, 15 universities membership, more than 75 educational institutions, 376,000 resources, more than 108,000 resources in the platform. There was the SHEMS also a award for community engagement with OER. And it was on three categories for institutions, individuals, and the private sector for the dedicated and distinguished participants. The SHEMS ambassadors in a recruited program in recruited talents and in digital content production and publishing through OER and facilitate the contribution in SHEMS. Finally, the development of SHEMS to and keep its sustainability, through the support of the cloud computing and the single access. And I'm sorry, and develop the tools and means for writing and digital assessment, build digital curricula applications, provide digital contents of both synchronized and asynchronous courses, and meetings and meetings also repositories for educational training and digitization. And also the SHEMS innovation and research program which includes scientific reports, studies, articles, and journals relating to open educational resources, and the National Forum for Participation in the circulation of ideas, innovation, research results and scientific trends in the open educational resources, and also including some research and innovative resources for funding and sponsorship channels. And here is the open idea Saudi resources SHEMS. And I would like to thank you everyone and we'll wait for the Q&As at the end of this session. Thank you very much. That was pretty amazing I want to say so thanks very much for sharing all that with us. As Pani said we take questions in mostly like I'm going to say in nearly 20 minutes so I'm going to go straight for the last presentation of this session and this is going to be Eba. I'm talking about Global Monitoring of the UNESCO OEA recommendation, so Eba, the floor is yours. Can you see my screen? Yes. So thank you very much for the possibilities to be here at the OEA Global Conference. It's a great pleasure and honor. And thank you participants for being with us here. I will talk about the Global Monitoring of the UNESCO OEA recommendation. Actually from the beginning we had submitted a workshop so it should have been longer so maybe you have seen that if you have looked in advance for this presentation. But anyway, I'm so happy to be here with my distinguished colleagues who have talked so very enthusiastic and impressive about the implementation of the OEA. So I will do the presentation on behalf of all of us from the ICD OEA Advocacy Committee. And here we are. So myself, I'm a Professor in Innovation and Open Online Learning. I'm based in Sweden and I'm also, as Turia was saying this morning in the ICD Board and I'm also sharing for the third mandate period, the ICD OEA Advocacy Committee, which is a great pleasure and honor. I have been in the area of OEA since it really started in back in 2002. And I suppose many of you have been there too. In Sweden, I'm the Vice President for the Swedish Association for Distance Education. I'm also working for the International Council on Bachelors and Credentials. Just to mention some of my activities from an independent consultant and researcher and expert in the field. So I have some of my colleagues here today. For example, I'm Francis Obiade Agbo from Nigeria, and also how can I, how can I do from Turkey. We have Melinda de la Pena, Bada Laria from Philippines. Daniel Burgos is here with us today from Spain. We have also Xinyang Zhang from China here with us today. We have Rosa Leonora Olia Casares from Mexico and Mephine Macau from South Africa. She is also with us today. We have Christina Guzmau from Brazil. Yiyang from the U.S. and Constance Blomgren from Canada. And Trisha Shapin-Shane from New Zealand. She is also here with us today. So as you see, we are 12 ambassadors in the ICD or Advocacy Committee. And we have also for this period, the third period, we have ambassadors from all continents and all regions of the globe. So that is very, very good. I would like to share some of the activities that we have done last year. And some examples from some of my colleagues, which has shared that with me. So first of all, the ICD or Advocacy Committee was launched in 2017 at the ICD conference in Toronto. So as I said, we are now for the third period and I have been sharing the committee since then. So we have, of course, some guidelines for us to working with the ICD ambassadors, we are ambassadors. So of course, the main task is about Advocacy in all kinds of means. It was like that that there was a call from ICD looking for ambassadors. So each of the ambassadors you saw on the list had applied and there was no nomination and then the Advocacy Committee was started. So we really looked for the global outreach. So of course, the basis for this period, which is the 21-22. It was actually approved by the board to have a period of four years, but we decided to have it two plus two in case because it was a long time to maybe commit yourself for four years. So we had for ambassadors are now for two years. And of course we are following the strategic plan, which is newly launched by ICD and also from the activity plan. So we're working very, very much in a close collaboration with ICD and we used to meet here once a month and also have input from ICD. And we also report to ICD two times a year. I think each of us have had some kind of this slide, what we mean by the recommendation and as the two of us were saying this morning. It is the first one on education, and it's actually just the 12th one from UNESCO. So that also shows how important this recommendation is for implementation. And as we all know, it has been a long process started back in actually 2002. So some years, but I know that the last four years at least there was some huge work on this to get to this done. And as we know, all member states adopted the recommendation. I will of course not go through it because we all know what it is about. But I think it's important to have my presentation in the context, but maybe I would like to stress about the stakeholders. Because that is very important as the stakeholders above both the formal and non-formal and informal sectors, and more or less all kind of professionals are involved to make this happen with the implementation. And that really means what was also stressed by Rob about the ecosystem. We need to work together in different kind of sectors and see where we are as an ecosystem, not just the resources as such. This has also been shown by my colleagues. But I think it's important to see that the recommendation is so wide and so broad, because it is about building, developing, encouraging, nurturing and promoting and reinforcing all those five areas. But it is also about monitoring and evaluation. So everything we do in the sector of OER implementation, we also have to monitor and evaluate. And of course, to do research about. So I will now show briefly some examples from some of the regions. I will start with the South Africa, so we'll do it in antibiotic order. Last week, actually the second, the second of September, there was a fantastic colloquium. Hosted by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training Research. And before the colloquium, there were five webinars, and it lasted you in three weeks. It was really, really high level conference with all the ministers and with a lot of, with a lot of chancellors from universities all over Africa and also with international guests. I myself and also my Athena Mac Macau was invited to give speeches. And I will say that the key message from the conference at this very, very high level colloquium was about the future of education is simple. It is about open flexible and learning and the implementation of OER. So that was the main message from this colloquium. I think that is very, very strong. It's a very, very strong message. And I wrote a blog post about this conference, it would be hopefully published by ICD in the coming week or weeks. I posted it yesterday. I have some examples from Mexico. What they are doing. This is a comprehensive platform, which aims to contribute, oh sorry. Maybe more space and the space aims to contribute to human and supportive training that strengthen the students communities values attitude attitudes and abilities. And to achieve integration on environment to search for better living conditions. This is in Spanish Spanish. At the moment, but maybe it will be translated as well to English. And the resources are used for leveling academic skills and for online study of newly enrolled students. And they are doing some analytics about it. It is of this repository. I started actually from August last year, and they have now some 250 students, not the numbers that we asked her from my colleague, but it is in a starting position. 70, almost 70 enrolled the leveling course. And from now from January this year. They have 700 students. So that means due to the short time it has been up and running. It has increased more or less almost two times. So it is a promising natural initiative from Mexico. Another one is this platform for citizen security. And they have a lot of resources from this for this. At this, at this platform, how, how to work with them, citizen security and how to learn about that for citizens. It's a great initiative from the United States. We have one initiative from New Zealand, which is in collaboration with the Commonwealth of learning about digital skills for sharing. And this course is in collaboration also with our university and with Wayne McIntosh. And our ambassador from Tresh from New Zealand. Her colleagues have been working on this initiative. It is a course over three weeks. And there were especially focus on US learners teachers from the Pacific Islands. And it started now in September and then there are some 1000 learners already. So from our country. Sweden. We had recently. An assignment from the government about learning resources in the schools. And in the K12 sector. And it was about the name for that was to strengthen the laborious function on them. Information system, how to better serve, serve the learners in the schools with learning resources. And then there was some citations which was from this report is that they because they refer to the UNESCO or our recommendation that schools have to apply the use of our for quality resources. I also say that said that it is, as you can see in the first one that UNESCO not got maybe so many reports, just about the implementation as they used to monitoring recommendations every fourth year and it was not four years since it was launched. So maybe not so many reports so far. The Swedish government to have to monitoring it and of course report as soon as they can. And it was also recommended that recommended that that the concept of we are should be used and should be implemented in in schools as the learners need to have access to good quality teaching materials. That is very important. When the recommendation was out in the 2019. We were some volunteers, starting to work as what we call meeting place or we are Sweden. It is actually running now by making media Sweden. So we come together and discuss the what we had to do of course we were in discussion with the UNESCO board in Sweden, and they couldn't do so much unfortunately because they didn't had at that time the assignment from the government and the government hadn't got any hadn't said any recommendations what to do and who to do it so we started and actually and UNESCO supported us. So what we did was to immediately set up a web place, which we call meeting place over Sweden where we gather all kind of resources both international ones, of course those from UNESCO and UNESCO we are the number coalition. And also the Swedish resources we know about and we have also sent out of course information in our network to gather resources to have this on some kind of hub, national hub. We also launched a web platform on Facebook, which is the one to the to the right. So I will say about the meeting place or we are Sweden as well. We started immediately to translate the recommendation because we thought that Swedish is less used language. It is easier to understand what it is about. You can read it in your own language and contextualize it because language is not about language as such is also about the culture and tradition and history and this kind of things and you use different kind of words, which is in the recommendations so that was the first we discussed that with UNESCO board and then they said it was very good initiative and also supported it very much but they couldn't still do anything, but they really supported us. And thank us also for the work we did and I can say that since we translated it. It is much more easy for our networks for our members for our colleagues to to rely to it and to really see what it is about it is so broad and not just about open textbooks or short resource resources or recording films or whatever. But it is in all those five areas and also the background about it. We also decided in this group that we need to do something larger. So we decided to host a conference for decision makers on the second anniversary day for that when the recommendation was out to 25th of November. So we are planning for a large conference for decision makers at all levels at government level at the authorities at the business levels at the university and school levels. And we already have some speakers. Confirmed, and that is saying that the varaglou from UNESCO or dynamic coalition. This is Anna Karen Jonson from the Swedish UNESCO board. She is the general secretary general. We have to run yes we get speak from ICD. And we have the calendar song from the university in higher education from the University of Higher Education Council. The Swedish students, the Swedish student union. And there will of course be some more speakers but we have speakers at a very, very high level, how we can work on implementation of the orientation with high quality and at all kind of levels. Last week, Friday last week we had the Switch Association for Distance Education's annual conference. Meeting Place OER was presented there by Wikimedia. And actually that was I think the third or fourth time we presented it at the national conferences. So some other activities what we are doing in ICD or advocacy committee is as I said of course about advocacy. We also work with the ICD virtual conference week we will have presentations there and many of us are in the scientific committee for the conference. We also work with the ICD leadership summit. I myself and I'm in the program committee. And we work together with ICD for their newly made advocacy campaign. We are doing UNESCO World Dynamic Coalition, and we also involved in the network of open organizations and used to participate in their monthly meetings and follow the work. Open praxis, the journal from ICD. Many of us are reviewers for the journal and we're also planning some publication publication there. We work with Arnold because one of our message is the chief editor for that journal. And open education for a better word. I'm also working on that we have to two persons which are who I work with this year and the last year I was also involved with one colleague. We participate in conferences and we publish a lot in different kind of journals, book chapters, reports, etc. New conferences and publications is one of the largest tasks we have. For the second amended period, we did a survey on the OVR implementation. It was actually mentioned by Jacques as well in the morning, and this is this one. We decided at that time when the recommendation had been out for a while to see how it was implemented around the globe. We did a survey out and we published this report. And as you can see, we had answers from all the regions. And when we were also together with Janasko and Seinep together with us and had discussions with her. And also with the network of organizations and the report is was published in 2020. The summary is translated into those different languages where we had ambassadors from. So English, Chinese, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. So some more activities. We're doing this conference. And then many of us are being reviewers, many of us are shares during the week and besides this presentation for today. Ambassadors have a lot of presentations during the week so please follow us. We have a LinkedIn profile so you can also also most welcome to see what is happening there. So thank you very much for your attention and I'm sure if you have any questions later on, both me and my colleagues who are here. I'm more than happy to discuss with you. Thank you. But this is the time for questions now so the floor is open to you all. Thank you to all our presenters. Feel free to write your comments on your question on the task but also you can open up your microphone and speak with your friends here. So if anyone wants to take the floor or probably they want raise your hand so we go to reactions at the bottom of your screen. You will see how one of those options to have that is raised hand. So if you're using the community, you might as well use it. So does anybody have a question? Does anybody have a comment for any or all of our presenters? So I will need a chair with four legs if I do not question myself so let's keep it up. So here's my question guys. And I have more than one answer. And so we have been talking so we're talking about building capacity, right? So it's about building capacity from the first presentation there's been this comment about trying to figure out what are the different priorities for the different needs from different regions. So my question is how different those needs and priorities. So that's the first one. How different is how different are those? Are they really different or do you see a common pattern of different work in different contexts? And then is there a global response to local needs? It's straight to ICV or Rob you're opening your mouth so go ahead show for it. Yeah the fatal mistake. So just thinking about what you said and in some ways there's quite a lot of capacity, right? There's quite a lot going on and it's a global conference, right?  Because sometimes it's easy to start reinventing things or to repeating what someone else has done but in a new context. And there's a part of the whole idea with reuse and reappropriation of resources is that you don't have to start from scratch again every time, right? There's something to build on. So I think it's partly a matter of increasing capacity but it's also a matter of making more coordinated use of the capacity that we've got. Which obviously I spoke about a bit in my presentation. But that's another way of looking at it. It's not just about purely increasing it, it's also about coordinating it and becoming more efficient. And our colleagues in the library sector tell us that when it comes to looking at models for funding and distributing at least OA books and I'm going to talk about books because that's what I know about. And that model is definitely not going to fit. Not even within a European country, leave alone between European countries because the funding remits is so different. The systems of like reward for academics are different. And the systems for getting books distributed are different and people have different kinds of money to invest. So we have to be able to support a variety of approaches by OA initiatives be that publishers or infrastructure providers and find a way to connect them. And as you say, allow them to reuse and build on what's already been done in a way that doesn't duplicate labor, but equally doesn't impose conformity, because the same model doesn't work in different local contexts. I agree with that, but I wasn't sort of implying, we just take what works in one place and apply it everywhere else. It was more the idea that we become more efficient by sharing precisely those kind of experiences and what works and what doesn't work rather than to start from scratch again and solve all the problems again themselves for their context. Some of it is transferable. And it's I think it's more about the culture around it. Right. If you like it's a sort of open educational practices angle, where it becomes about sharing the benefit of experience transparently rather than in a kind of competitive way for one of the best word. And that being the sort of the foundation for it. So I would call that a form of coordination, rather than I think coordination is a good word for it, rather than rather than consolidating I think coordination. I don't have code with by the way, sorry. I can also intervene from the, like, you link between the reality of a very particular context of, in our case the language, the French language, and the needs global openness, the concept of openness which we are is, I think, like the whole philosophy about the educational resources that access for everyone, everything is sure able transparent. How do you match this and understand that that's that's what you're asking us is if there is specificities and if the global author of we are can respond to the, to the national and reality of a national language. And so we've been confronted to that in this French speaking group, and not only there was a French language is also the culture because a French speaker from France has not the same references cultural references necessarily than a French speaker from Africa or from Canada but that's that's been also that's something that's, that's also a present in the recommendation that the need for adaptation and for, for multi language approach. And in our case, we bump into it every time there is also. There is an issue with that list of French author of we are there is a high dominance of English speaking or because of the history of we are and so one of our partners for instance has a project now. We have a collaboration actually also we're all connected here but through robots algorithm to identify which French speaking we are are around now, and then the index is indexing is an issue because for the robots to be able to identify the mystery index in a specific way. So that's another like to respond to a specific need a language. What are the French speaking we are available today, then you bump into new challenges so it's something that you have to have in mind. And I think the recommendation gives the framework directions to to support us in the work, but then we also need to be aware and try to to map and that's what we're trying to do for the front of on world from co phone African partners that we have specific needs, and how can best support our different partners how can each region identify in partnership like the multi stakeholder I think also is key has on where Rob present in the project is trying also to to put this business world with the academic awarding contacts so they can together map what's the needs and the partnership the connection between the different stakeholders and the mapping and of what's there and what can be proposed as as tools and and adaptability keeping the the multi language part so that whatever I mentioned to about the Swedish I started to translate the recommendation in Swedish so that they could talk to the partners in the country and it will make sense for them to work with that that that's that's something that's also what we've seen at least that that is question. Hi. I totally agree with everyone and agree with Rob when you mentioned the word coordination coordination is key here. There's lots of efforts that's been done in the Arab coalition for all yours. And we are sharing lots of lessons learned discussing business models the frameworks for all yours. So, very important components that each country can learn from each other like for example the budgets, the, the fine, the funding models, the investment the keep how to keep the sustainability of these all yours, regulating the relationship with others, the setting the rules the mechanisms. The governance model so all these frameworks and models can be shared and and benefit from to not reinvent the wheel and benefit from countries cases and share best practices and lessons learned. Thank you very much and I have a question for everyone. I'm wondering about the, the, in your countries, respectively, how the OER was working during the pandemic, how students and faculty members were connected to these resources to benefit from. This is really a question that I'm thinking about for everyone. And I don't know, I will give too far to about because she will be more expert even than me but I think the OER survey that she meant the RAC survey that she mentioned had tried to identify the before the pandemic and after the pandemic and within the implementation of the of the recommendation if the countries had. Yeah, well so I buy, please just because I think that's that's a good example. I think so too, as I mentioned that this study was made in 2020. And it was actually right in this in the start of the pandemic. So first of all, I mean, it was, first of all, it was a side by many, and I will say also that the respondents were on individual base, not representing the country always. But first of all, most of the respondents said that it was to the recommendation was to a new to see any any specific effect. But they also could confirm that due to the pandemic. The whole issue of openness the whole issue of sharing and the sharing culture had increased a lot. And maybe some of the main results from that report but I can also mention I have myself together with for example Daniel Burgers who is here today maybe you can comment as well. We have been involved in two large research studies. One will be presented. I think it is on Wednesday for this conference. A global study about open education and open science and that also mentioned about the pandemic and COVID, but also not a study by by Aras Buskar where I think we were some 35 researchers around the globe covering a 65% of the or almost 70% of the countries in the world, who were all countries and all respondents and researchers said that. Again, that the culture sharing the use of OER and the use of MOOCs, and the whole issue of open educational practices, and the culture as I said and the people's attitudes and this kind of things really had changed to a huge extent. I think we have we have already seen so much by research and I mean, all of you have been involved in so many projects so you can, I think, confirm it. I don't know if you don't ever say something about those research reports. If you have the right to speak, I don't know. What again speak. I don't know if Daniel is here. Oh, sorry, sorry. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm actually going to, while I don't see Daniel straight away so I don't like this around but I'm going to say, and this is coming. Totally. Yes. Okay, go for it. Connecting. Listen, there is an interrupted connection here. Sorry for that. How can I. Do you want to comment on it as comments so about kind of the use of open educational resources in the times of pandemic. Yes, of course, I am trying. I, the connection is not good so sorry for that. Yes, I was listening to us because in fact we have commented very much on on this extensively for the last two years and across the continents and I think is there is a very well cross approach about we are in times of pandemic because we've been working with many countries in the five continents. And I think that we all share the same feeling of the urgent need to use something that is useful for everyone. And then the use of OER meant that people were a little more aware of using the we are and also producing stuff to others. So the point of being generous and self given also to contribute to the OER umbrella and not just to consume the resources. I think it was one of the main feelings that the rights arose from these last months. Okay, so the point is that to me the most understand the interesting part is that there is a flow. Sometimes we complain just to say the word politely but we complain, but sometimes is that there is an unilateral way of approaching OER that is me taking whatever is the possible from the repositories and not me contributing to the repositories, because there's a group is not everyone an extended feeling of giving and taking and having this flow and it changed between all the people around, even between countries and languages. I think it's a quite improvement in this pandemic so the situation brought something good, which is a feeling of actually sharing in both ways. So it's just to offer a brief perspective on this and I'm not teaching at the moment so it's not personal experience, more just what I've picked up on. Most of the move during the pandemic to online education to me was characterized by chaos and crisis management, and people not necessarily with any training on how to do online learning, going, I've got to do online now, like, next week. So I'm just going to travel go and just try and do it. And a lot of those people are not really aware of open education or OER options at all. Right. And, and I would say the main sort of advantage. I mean there's two ways with this right. And these have been very quick to go into that space. And so here you go here's the complete solution to the problem that you've got here's an online curriculum for you to use, but it's all proprietary and often locked down into particular technology or licensing option. And in some ways, the best option with all this is to take advantage of the chaos. Right. And the fact that there is a bit of a rupture between the way things were being done before and the way things are going to be done in the future. And there is a chance there to advocate for open approaches. And the challenge is that there's commercial publishers with entire marketing departments already doing that. They're already trying to have the conversations with the Vice Chancellors and so on. So, again, it's that idea of coordination and how do we make sure that we advocate the open approaches of the way to go with moving education online. And that's quite a big challenge, actually, because in a way there's now a fork in the road where increased use of online and blended learning can be filled with commercial options and it can be filled with more open options, some blend of the two. But because all the pieces are kind of up in the air at the moment it remains to be seen how it will pan out. It could be the beginning of something big. It could be towards openness, but it could just as easily be a move towards very locked, very closed proprietary learning systems that fill that space. So, it's an interesting crossroads in a way. I'm going to bring you very quickly again. Totally my experience because it kind of goes slightly against Daniels and so I'm originally from Spain, but but I work in the Netherlands, and as Rob said, pandemic hits, it's like, just give me something I have to teach online I need something quick right. So, yes, it is true that we have seen, and I do work with with teachers on a regular basis, we have seen more teachers consuming or we are but not necessarily sharing what they create beyond the five four walls of the institution. So that was kind of, it is true that we should kind of take this opportunity to not let them go back to the way they used to do things and you know, since they're creating more stuff online for example, we should be able to kind of grab them and say okay so now please just I'm going to push you gentlemen for you to continue doing this, but let me because I'm conscious of the time and I really really want us to cannot touch anything, but this is something that's kind of worrying me. And this is in connection with this what I was asking you earlier bars about the different needs and now you've brought in this idea of coordination, but to be honest, I was very curious and somehow surprised to hear about this idea of fragmentation, right drop that you were talking about in connection to fragmentation being a challenge. Right, and I did not necessarily see fragmentation as a challenge so so that's what kind of prompted very quickly all this thinking about. Yes, we're diverse does that mean that we are fragmented is that a good scene or is that a bad thing. See what I'm going. I would say fragmentation isn't distributed equally right so some places are more fragmented than others, but you have to look at all of the different stakeholder types this is relevant to. So yeah within open education through conferences like this there's a lot of people connecting through open networks open communities, and they're quite porous and it's quite easy for people to get into those. If you look at the sort of policy frameworks across Europe as a whole, they're quite uneven. If you look at the level of provision is quite uneven. So, what we don't have is a European wide approach, we don't you know we have different activity in different places. What we don't have is an understanding of the ecosystem as a whole and where to direct the efforts for things as a whole. We don't really really talk about their own context and their own kind of situations. And sometimes people make great progress in those and that spreads. But, but yeah I would say there's still work to be done to meet the potential of open education approaches right so we've got sort of models for how it can work and we've got sort of proof of concept and successful examples. What we don't have is a strategy for how to roll it out across the whole of Europe and advocate for it in the right way. And if you just look at the fact that we're way below 5% proliferation of where we are into education, publishing and use resources, there's massive potential for more coordination and more impact. And I would say that there isn't activity in a lot of places and it's not connected in some way. It's just that as a whole for society, it's happening in pockets still. It's just that we're in the pockets you know we're in the echo chamber all the time and we're talking to people who know about where we are. And I think yeah we can, we can, sorry, carry on I'll say I was just going to say I think too much fragmentation and because you say because we are in these pockets. And sometimes miss the way that we're the best within the world that can entrench inequalities of access that are already there. Because the last thing in the world that we want. And we've seen this in the book sphere a lot is to accidentally create like a two tier system, or a three tier system even where the people who would probably be in a position, would be better positioned to be able to purchase traditional hard copies or traditional ebook copies are the ones with the ability to coordinate and access and network around away away. What's the word I'm looking for things you can use you know affordances. And I think that if we kind of stay in our pockets too much, we miss, we might accidentally, we might kind of entrench that system by accident. I would agree that a non fragmented world would be an ideal, something that we should strive to achieve but as we said earlier, many of us were in disaster recovery mode when the pandemic started. So there is fragmentation between the people who were actually very good at open and distance education, and the people who just wanted. Well, I need to do my lecture next week, I need to reach out to my existing students, regardless of the fact that it is a good or bad open education practice. So that is also something that we need to consider. Another thing that we need to consider is that openness is often a matter of degree. We are using zoom today. We're not using an open source alternative. So, one of the challenge we faced. I'm afraid is not only a two tiered three tiered a multi tiered system, keeping in mind the dynamic that we want to the goal to the ultimate goal we want to achieve. And in the meantime, we need to understand better the compromise we have to make in different regions of the world between open education, commercial education and state sponsored education. In Africa, most of my colleagues are better than we are in France because in France, we are rich. We have state universities in Africa. They tell me that, you know, we have 10% of the space needed for the students that we need to educate. So we need to have commercial providers. So we need to regulate to be able to regulate commercial providers. So are there better than we are in France at regulating commercial providers. So I think my message would be that we have an ideal we need to go further toward the ideal but along the way there will be compromises to be made, and there will be adaptations to be made to the local system, according to the maturity of each country, the educators, legal regulatory or market frameworks. And this is what we're going to leave it. Thank you so much, Jack, for the last, those last words, but we have to leave you guys because I'm expressing. I invite you all to continue the conversation in OET, so OE Global Connect. Let me just share the link in the chat. If not, thank you so much. You've all been wonderful. I'm going to stop the recording.