City Building. My name is Professor Jean Francis Abu. I'm from Nigeria. I work with the National Open University of Nigeria. And I want to welcome all of you to this session. We are going to have four presentations. And I think the next thing I have to do is to introduce the the topics and the presenters. The first one is a framework for categorizing digital materials. So that's the minute. So this presentation is proposing a framework that allows a differentiated categorization of digital learning resources, which gives guidance for institutional policy development. Then the next presentation, and this presentation is by Ben Johnson and Rabbi Showa. I hope I got it. Then the second one is Go Open, supporting higher education staff engagement in open educational practices. This paper is by Anna Ferrell, James Brunton, Alan Brinn. It's a lot of people. A lot of people. And I don't want to pronounce names. And the paper reports on the activities of a team of Dublin City University, DCU composed of academic staff and library staff who engage in collaborative projects. Then the next one is designing infrastructures, allowing higher education teachers to reuse, adapt, exchange, and exchange open educational resources by Nadine Schroder, Sophia Kra, and Joanne's Vents. Yes. According to this paper, when designing OER infrastructure, it is essential to be aware of practices higher education teachers have for digital environment when using and revising as well as sharing open educational resources. Then the last presentation actually by 17 presenters, partway to learning international collaboration under COVID-19 by Robert Ferrell and Adams, Margaret Buchesha Eta. We have about 16, 17 presenters slated for this topic. And what's the title or the paper seeks to note is that both these aspects were presented in education research that the aspects that they want to present in presenting a recent education research collaboration between African Council for Distance Education and Open University UK. Partway to learning. So I want to welcome everyone to this session. I think we'll have to go straight with that being said. According to our guideline introduction should be 10 minutes. And I think we are okay, although it's less than 10 minutes. All right. And also we need to note that you can use the chat button to send messages and also the question by button for questions for the presenters. So I think we are good. We can go straight to the first presentation. A framework to categorizing digital learning material by Ben Johnson and Robert Schoer. So please welcome. Please take it from there. I forgot to unmute. Thank you, Jane, for your introduction and welcome everybody and for our presentation. This presentation is compiled by Ben Johnson and myself. We have agreed that I will do the presentation and that Ben will monitor the chat for questions. As I understood earlier is that the discussion and the Q&A will be after all four presentations. So that will be the order of this webinar. Well first, why a framework? Yes. I will first get you the context in which the need for such a framework as we will present was felt. In the Netherlands, we are now in the third year of a national innovation program, which is called the Acceleration Plan. And in this plan, the High Education and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. And SERV, which is the organization for all high education in the Netherlands, the cooperation, work together to boost innovation in education with ICT. It is divided in several topics and one of the topics where institutions are working on is innovation in digital open learning resources. And in this context, we are not only working on adoption and boosting adoption of open educational resources, but we are adoption of digital learning resources in general. And among them are also open educational resources. So that's the context. So we are not only talking about OER, but we are also talking about other types of resources. And we had a question, what are we talking about when we use this term digital education resources? Because I don't know if any one of you has ever noticed, but when you will are looking for what is meant by digital education resource, it is very hard to find or even it is impossible to find a standardized definition for it. There are many, many is written, there's a lot that's written about educational resources, and then there become some sorts of definitions for it, but there is not one standardized definition for it. And that makes a question of what is meant by OER, what is meant by other types of educational resources that makes it difficult to think about. So when this question arose, we were talking, and that is our proposal which we will present here, to devise a framework. And while we are not the first to devise this framework, we found a framework David Riley had sketched in, I think it was a presentation he had last year, and we have taken this framework as a basis and we extended this framework to comprise all the types of educational resources we thought were for use in this acceleration plan. And it allows us to position these different types of learning resources in relation to each other. So we used two dimensions for this framework. The first dimension was the access or accessibility of a digital learning resource, and the others are the right to adapt those resources. Well, people familiar with open educational resources know that these are the two main dimensions to follow. And therefore, for us, it was quite clear to use these two dimensions to categorize learning resources. When we look more closer to each of these two dimensions, and also these were the dimensions of David Riley also used in his framework, which I think will be no surprise everyone knowing David Riley. We saw four values for the dimension access or accessibility. We say, well, you can have no restrictions at all for everyone. So learning resources can be available for everyone without any restrictions. We call this open access. There can be some restrictions, but not financial, and then still everyone will have those restrictions. In most cases, this will be creating free accounts to access those resources. And that is the non-financial restriction, which is mostly used in this case for these types of resources. You can think, for instance, on MOOCs, where you have to create an account, which is for free, and then you can access the MOOC. We can also think of non-financial restrictions, but the resources are not accessible for everyone. This is also called a walled garden. Those are communities, in most cases, communities, but can also be institutions where you have to prove that you are part of this community, mostly also with a log in, and then you can get access to these resources. And there can be financial restrictions. And then you can access these resources. The other dimension are the adaptation rights. Adaptation rights, well, with two things, resources can be either adaptable or non-adaptable. Adaptable will have permissions, and non-adaptable users will have no permissions to adapt the resources. And there's also the term free learning resources, and those are those digital learning resources where there are no financial restrictions to access them. And then we came to this framework where you have sketched those two dimensions. So you see horizontally the accessibility where the most left is the least of the most accessible, and at the most right are the least accessible learning materials. And from top to bottom, you see the adaptation rights with the most rights to adapt to the least rights to adapt. You see, it distinguishes between the public domain and the CC0 licenses, because, well, everyone knows the Creative Commons license where you have, which you can use to provide to the user what they are allowed to do with the resources. And, for instance, attribution or share alike, et cetera. Well, those are common, you can call this the kind of common knowledge. And the difference between the public domain and the CC0 is in the public domain. It is by kind of law that resources are in the public domain. In the Netherlands, it is after 75 years after the death of the author, the works become available in the public domain. The CC0, you can decide as an author immediately whether or not you give your resource without any conditions free to adapt. Well, this gives this framework, and using these dimensions, it gives us also the possibility to closer define the types of learning resources we distinguish in the program. So first, we have the open education resources. Well, actually, these are the only types of learning resources we found where there is actually more or less standardized definition, although there are several versions of these definitions exist. This definition is the one the ULIT Foundation uses, but there's also the definition, of course, of UNESCO, which are in some points differ from this, but actually use other wordings to say the same. We also have the types of, we use the term semi open resources, and those are the open resources. So the adaptability are the five R's available, but they are only available to a limited group of persons. And we have the term commercial resources, and those are the teaching, learning and research resources, only available under financial restrictions. That will be the definition we use in our innovation program. And we also have the term closed resources, and in most cases, commercial resources and closed resources are used as synonyms, but actually they aren't because closed resources, well, as we see it, you are just teaching, learning and research resources, and they are not available for person or group of persons. So, and that depends on the perspective of the stakeholder. For instance, when learning resources are only available for people working at the institution where I'm working in, then those resources are available for me, but everyone outside of my institution, for them those resources are not available, so they remain closed. And actually, in a blog post, I made the comparison between closed resources and what in quantum physics is called the the metaphor of the Freudianist cat, where you can, until you access, you try to access those resources, then you find out whether they are closed or not closed, and before accessing, they can be both closed or non-closed. So here are our, placed our categories in the framework, so you see the OER, the semi-open, which includes also materials which cannot be adapted or not, because they, for instance, have the the the ND clause in the CC license, but they can still be shared in this for a limited group of persons, and we have the non-free, which we call the commercial resources, and well, they can be adaptable or non-adaptable, but that depends on the kind of license you buy from the publisher who are publishing those resources. And we have used this framework now in our workshops for people starting using open or semi-open education resources, and this is the first experience we have with these frameworks in these workshops, that it makes things a lot clearer than just presenting all the definitions and all the stuff on creative commons licenses, which in most cases will only focus on the OER and not on the other types of resources, and therefore we have placed also some examples of types of resources in the framework to make it more clear for the people we have in our workshop. So this is the framework we wanted to present, so thank you for your attention. Yeah, thank you so much, Robert. Thank you so much. Very insightful. I was trying to listen and also go through the chat. I think we have to take the second presentation, because from the guideline here, we'll take the questions and the other comments after the end of the four presentations, so and we are doing great. I'm sure we're going to have a long enough time to trash out all the observations and the questions. Okay, so thank you so much for a wonderful presentation. Thank you. So the second is Go Open, Supporting Higher Education Staff Engagement in Open Educational Practices by Anna Ferrell and Atal. So Wu is taking the presentation from the high two. Jane Francis, me and James are here yet. Okay. Thank you for the welcome. Thank you. I'm going to start and share my screen if that's okay. Yeah. So hi everyone. How are you? Hopefully you can see my screen there, can you? Yes, yes. Fantastic. So delighted to be here today at OE Global. So this is a big group involved in this project. So on behalf of the group myself and James will be presenting today, the project is called Go Open. It's a very small local open education project and I know this being OE Global, people will be talking about big national and regional projects, but this is a nice small local project and really actually it was inspired by OE Global two years ago. I think it was two years ago. When was OE Global in Milan? Was it 2019? Yeah, November 19, 2019. Okay. So myself and James and another colleague, Yarene, who's also involved in this project, went to OE Global in Milan. It was actually probably my last in-person conference since the pandemic. Fantastic conference and we saw some really great examples at that conference of librarians working together with academic staff and learning designers and learning technologists in team-based projects in their institutions and we were really inspired by this. And at the same time, our university had a local funding call for a small amount of money, seed funding to undertake projects in the era of teaching and learning. So in the airport and on the plane home, we wrote this project proposal. And this is a true story.  So what we came up with was, there was very little going on in our institution in the way of open education, nothing formal. There were a number of people involved in some small level open education, I would say. So for example, some people would be publishing open access, sharing their research on maybe Zenodo or Research Gate. The library, we have an institutional repository, but it's very narrow in what it will accept. So there were some small seeds. I suppose our direct colleagues in the National Institute for Digital Learning, we would have been more involved in open education. And some of us have taken part in different open education initiatives and MOOCs, etc. So I suppose it went from us dipping our toe into trying to spread the word. So we formed a team with members from our own unit. So it's called the Open Education Unit. We deliver online education programs. And we collaborated with colleagues in the institutional library. And then later on, some colleagues from our Learning Design Unit. And it had a very simple aim. It was to try and support our university community to start engaging with open education, particularly in the area of teaching and learning. In the end, we didn't go so much into research. But in the initial aim, we did kind of talk about engaging the research side. So the project Go Open was funded by the National Forum, which is an Irish national body, and also by the university. So as you can see, the project team was big, representing lots of different parts of the university. And this proved actually to be something quite unique. We found working with particularly librarians very different because they had very different perspectives, approaches to us. And we learned, we really learned a lot from them. So the output and what we did in the project, I suppose, so we essentially wanted to put together a beginner's type guide to open education. Some small dipping the toe in the water examples and guidance. And, you know, I know there's there's stuff out there. So what we did was curate, put it together, also write some new stuff as well. In terms of our process, the whole project took took place during the pandemic. So it was all done online. The timeline obviously was a bit disrupted by the pandemic. But but we did manage to get back on track. So we worked with a combination of Zoom and Google Docs. And at the start, we kind of brainstormed what kind of things do academics want to know about open education and how, you know, different ways and approaches by again, we looked at some of the literature that you can engage people in open educational practices. And then we started collaboratively working on the resources. So James, I'll hand over to you. Thank you. And just to say as well, this would not be the only example of concrete teaching and learning innovations for us that have been directly inspired by attendance at OE Global conferences. I could I could talk for the same amount of time about open pedagogical assessments, which like what my team is doing now is directly inspired by the OE Global conference that was on in the Netherlands a few years ago. And so the target market, as Orne already said, what we were thinking about in this in this project was from our perspective, how would we try to hook people who are not already involved or engaged in open education, open educational practices at all. And it was it was really interesting for us to try not just don't just think about that from our point of view, but also from the librarian's point of view, because we're all we're definitely already in that bubble, whereas the librarians are used to supporting different staff from all different parts of the university with different attitudes to teaching and learning practices, never mind open educational practices. So our target audience was the uninitiated. And I suppose I mean, for me as part of the project, and I'm in another project, an EU and an open game, which has similar aims, and we've we've thought, you know, we've thought about this from a different angle. You know, often there's a lot about open education that initially can be a little bit intimidating for my own experience. When I started coming to these conferences first and sort of really meeting, you know, open education scholarship, pedagogy, open, you know, open education policy national and international, you know, like that's a tough place to sort of if that's your first meeting of open education, that can be tough.  But I think it's also there's a lot going on in that definition. If you give that to someone first, it might not, you know, it might not hook them into trying something out in their classroom or trying something out in their in their assessments. And the same with the policy, a lot, I think a lot of academics, you know, if they're doing their teaching and learning practice, they, they're not, they're not inspired by policy a lot of the time, even though if we don't have that policy there, we'll never get anywhere. So next slide. So the underlying idea of this initiative was to start with the basics and the practical, the things we were trying to give people through the guide were, you know, just that just enough information, and then practical examples, and then some good links to resources or websites that we thought were really clear and gave people a lot. So, you know, trying to get people to understand that, you know, open educational practices can solve problems for people in their classrooms, in their assessments, that there are things that you can do that will make your life easier, will make the students life easier, if everyone's life is easier, that must be a, that must be a good thing to do. And if we can hook them at all, then give them somewhere to go, you know, give them one more link, you know, in a, in an area so that they can go and explore further. So just to build on what James is saying there, it was also from my experience of dipping my toe in the open space. And I really was interested in getting involved, but I did find some of the scholarship initially a bit off-putting. So I, in particular, was trying to answer questions that I initially had. So what we made was this beginner's guide, go open, beginner's guide to open education. And also the librarians, again, very much their influence, was to make a LibGuide version that we can, which is a living place, so that we can update, add resources. So for example, we launched the resources there during the summer, and we recorded the video, and now that's on there too. So it's a great way of, of keeping it a live space. We're going to show, we're going to show you both resources in a moment, but that just, there's the link, but maybe James, if you can put it in the chat, that'd be fantastic. And this is the LibGuide version. So currently the two versions are quite similar, because obviously, you know, a lot of time hasn't passed, but our aim is to add to this. And the LibGuides, again, there's quite a few different LibGuides out there. It's, again, it's something that the librarians are really into, but it's a really nice web platform that libraries use. And you can see quite user-friendly, and it was very easy to develop, and also very easy to update. So that, you know, we can, we can ensure that this lasts beyond the time of the project as well. So that is important too. We also made quite a lot of visuals, partly because we thought they also are a way of hooking people in. But we were also trying to give, you know, give people reasons to go open, and then ways to go open. So kind of in simple ways. So the big hook often, especially from the American literature we found is around textbooks is save money for your students. That possibly isn't as big a deal in other jurisdictions. Certainly in Ireland, students don't seem to spend as much on textbooks, but still, you know, the cost of going to university is still quite high. They have to pay fees. So if that helps, that's great. And bring real-world examples into your teaching. I think that particularly to me is quite attractive. Save time. Academics love saving time. And particularly during the pandemic period of having to pivot online, you know, if you could find a good resource rather than creating one yourself, obviously that's a win-win. And very much the fourth thing there, this is actually very, aligns very well with our university's mission, which is to transform lives in society. So the idea of broadening access, and we work ourselves in a programs that have that aim. So to give access to groups that otherwise couldn't get access. And then in terms of the ways, again, we were looking for very simple messages. Share your practice, you know, tweet something that you've created or put it in a repository. We give some examples of repositories. Deposit your work in open repositories. Zenodo, we particularly like, but other repositories out there to use Creative Commons licensing. And everything in this project is Creative Commons licensed to including all the images and the videos and everything. We tried to simplify that process because again, we ourselves found the process of choosing the right license a bit challenging. Even though the Creative Commons actually is a brilliant license wizard, which is a great resource, too. And then fourth, use open education resources. Do you have anything to add in there, James? That's a no, is it? James? Sorry, my phone is ringing. I'm money, I'm money recently back in my office and I don't know how to use this new handset they have in my office. You know, like this, this was the big thing for me was to try to put in as many hooks in terms of show people challenges, especially maybe low effort, low level challenges that could be addressed by low level, low effort, open educational practices. So if you can show people some of the major open textbook repositories and if they look in there and could very easily find a textbook that was similar enough to a commercial textbook, and if they replace that and saw an increase in student engagement with the readings because now that it's not difficult to source, they're not looking on Amazon, they're not buying the wrong edition because it's cheaper, they're not, you know, not getting it at all because they can't find it or they can't afford it. You know, if they, you know, if you can get people to just engage and tackle a little challenge like that, then I think that's a good route into open educational practice for people. Yeah. And I think they were kind of simple messages as well, which is helpful. So in terms of the projects, we've met the project deliverable in terms of the funding requirements, but we ourselves have some additional next steps in the process. One thing we'd like to do is to conduct a bit of local research, A, on what staff think of the guides. I know some students, so I know it's been integrated into a digital skills for students module. So I'd be curious about how the guides are being used, what people think of them. And I suppose if it's having any impacts in terms of people's engagement with open education. So that's the next phase we have to design a study. So I'm looking forward to that. And I'm going to stop, I'm going to stop sharing.  And if we're allowed to break the rules, we might take questions now, but I don't know if Jane Francis will agree to give me one sec just to get the website. Or James, do you have it handy? Oh, hang on. Yeah, I have it now. And there's some nice questions in the chat. I don't know. I may answer them. So here's the live guide version. As I said, super easy to design and build. We've got some learning designers involved later in the stage, and Alex, one of the designers helped us with the logos and stuff like that. And so you can see very, very simple questions and very simple answers. And that is on purpose. And in fact, that is actually hard writing in a kind of user friendly way. And we did curate some stuff. Oh, I don't know what's going on there. Sorry. Yeah, hang on one sec. That link opened out. You can see emphasis on the visuals. And then in terms of downloadable resources, everything is downloadable. And there is the guide as well. Anything else I should point out here, James? No, I mean, it's just, you know, I suppose it was really good for us to have the dual output because the form itself, or the guide itself, we can only highlight that to the extent that we can normally highlight things. You know, we can just try and do that as much as possible. Whereas the lib guide is kind of like a permanent place in the university website that, you know, that will be there. And it's easy to find when people go looking in the library for these kinds of resources, they will find that there. Yeah, it's on the university library website. And there was a good question there. How did you find effective incentives to engage academics? Yeah, we haven't actually, we're actually at a phase before that, nice to be perfectly honest. We're at the phase of this is what they are. Yeah, we're trying to evangelize. We haven't gotten to there. Would you like to try and use one or make one? But I think the next thing like that, we got just 1500 euro of funding to do this work. So that was enough impetus for us to form the group and actually get the work done. If we hadn't got that 1500 euro, 1500 euro is nothing. But it was enough to get us going. So I think small scale teaching and learning funds, this was so kind of cofunded by the National Forum and the university, more schemes like that that encourage people to take their ideas around different teaching and learning practices like this. So it would be when those schemes come out encouraging other people to go, Hey, why don't you look at our guide, maybe try, you know, try and do something around open textbooks, maybe make an open textbook with your students or something like that. And like if those if people have those ideas, and then there's some little bit of funding there to motivate them and actually pay for the graphic design or pay for, you know, a meeting or something, then I think we'll get more, we'll get more pockets of innovation and then hopefully mainstream these practices.  Because you know how hard it is to finish sometimes. But actually we had a deadline of this had to be done by this time. So if that actually was a great motivator to finish. As James is saying, like on a national level in Ireland, that National Forum group, they have really pushed open and are developing open infrastructure, national repositories just been formed, national policy. And but finally, I don't see the trickle down yet to the universities. Okay. So I think that's it. Unless unless we're allowed to take questions, Jane, are we? Not yet. Okay, okay. I think we're doing great. The guideline is for every presenter to have the opportunity to make presentations within 20 minutes. Then we have 30 minutes for questions and discussions. So I urge all the presenters to take note of the questions and the box are not able to follow through right now. So please just take note of your questions. And when we get to the discussion section, we can trash all the questions. Thank you so much for thank you wonderful presentations. And I'm also glad that your project was inspired by OE Global two years ago. I'm really glad about that. So thank you so much. Thank you. Then the next one is designing infrastructures, allowing higher education teachers to reuse, adapt and exchange OER by Nadine Shröder, Sofia Kra and Joanne's rent. Okay. So who is presenting? Yeah, Nadine is sharing the screen. Both of us will be presenting. Sorry. Okay. But I'm not seeing anything yet. Oh, there it is. Okay, great. Yeah, we are really delighted to be here today and to present. And yeah, you, our research and development on infrastructures for the use of OER, it's only going to be Nadine and me today. But I think that will be good. In our presentation, we will start with some background information on our research project and our special focus will be on version management. After describing, shortly describing our interview study and some main results, we will then present some examples of our prototypical concept, including different phases of development and evaluation, so that you will get an insight into what we have done with our research. Yeah, now Nadine will start with the background information on our project. Yes. First of all, our research is embedded in a project called Educational Architecture, which has the go to make finding OER in German higher education landscape easier. Currently, in Germany, OER repositories are developed in several individual federal states as they act concerning education rather independently. With the aim of reducing these federal organizational structures, the overall project explores technical, dialectical and organizational requirements for designing the distributed infrastructure for OER. In our subproject, we work on a research study with focus on expectations and needs of higher education. Teachers for OER for OER infrastructures with a special focus on version management functions and collaborative elements. Our goal was to identify and develop possible solutions for designing OER platforms that can be adopted by developers. We are aware that there are established solutions and platforms for OER in the international environment, but our concern was to examine specific requirements from the German perspective. As I mentioned before, one special focus was on version management and the first question is what does version management have to do with OER? First of all, version control is mostly associated with software development and collaboratively working and editing software code. This includes several functions and these functions concern two different aspects, versions and derivatives. By changing, editing, updating one's own material, new versions were created. Especially when working together, version history and tracking changes are important and derivatives are created by using and adapting content of others. These so-called for folks enable a connection between a derivative and the original version and both scenarios can be adopted for OER when we think of revising, reusing, remixing and redistributing content according to the five Rs. In the context of OER, challenges that occur through different material types and five formats need to be considered. Therefore, version management offers potential to be adopted for OER, but further research is needed regarding functions and design of a user-friendly interface for OER which reaches needs and requirements of users. To get insight into those specific research needs and our open questions, we decided to conduct a semi-structured interview study with higher education teachers in German-speaking countries, focusing on the research questions, how do teachers create use and process OER, in which framework conditions does the work with OER take place, what difficulties do teachers encounter when working with OER, what expectations do teachers have about working with OER and most importantly, or at least that's what we are focusing on here, is how can teachers benefit from version management functionalities. We conducted the interviews from July until September 2020, so yeah, during the pandemic as well. We talked with 23 German-speaking university lecturers from Germany and Austria and we conducted a video interviews that lasted 30 to 60 minutes. Since the focus on the study was or is on the practices of higher education teachers with OER as well as their explicit and implicit knowledge about the use of OER, we conducted the interviews with teachers with OER experience only, but in order to adequately represent the diversity of active OER users, some of the interview teachers just first encountered with creating OER within the framework of projects mostly and other teachers have been continuously practicing OER within the teaching routine for several years. In terms of subject, six teachers came from the natural sciences and 11 participants from humanities and social sciences. As an introductory narrative stimulus, the teachers were asked to present one of their own OER learning materials, so we therefore gained some knowledge about their real OER experience and expertise right at the beginning from the interviews. Now we'll be continuing with some main results. As well, no OER can comprise material types with different scopes. This ranges from illustrations to presentations and videos to entire courses. OER that are published are often extensive material types with a high production effort such as videos or courses. Thanks Nadine. This contrasts with the fact that teachers prefer external materials with a small scope that can be used independently such as graphics, illustrations, or videos for use in their materials. This also goes hand in hand with practice of integrating individual elements of external materials into their own materials and adapting them into some cases. In front of this background in OER platforms it should be possible to divide extensive materials into individual thematic units or formats. Lecturers considered the provision of new versions to be useful and sensible, also in terms of quality assurance and for different scenarios. Reasons given for the availability of different versions include that changes over time can be shown and different editing scenarios can be provided. Likewise, deleting or archiving older versions should be possible to maintain freedom of choice and the availability of older versions so that incorrect versions do not remain in circulation. But when presenting different versions and overview and form of a version history is desired by the lecturers and it should also be possible to track changes between versions. Another really important factor was feedback and collaboration. The teachers seemed to be very interested in learning about external use, editing, and further dissemination of the materials. For example, to obtain suggestions for possible applications. And of course, teachers would like to receive feedback and suggestions on their own materials to improve and develop their content. The development of OER community with opportunities to exchange materials can also help to create cross-site collaborations, as we all know. Then active community can furthermore help to take over regular updating needs as teachers' own resources are not always as sufficient, especially after projects have ended. For collaborative editing of materials, teachers need a clear distribution of roles, which makes it possible for the responsible person to check and accept or reject changes made by the editors. Collaborative authoring is also prepared in a closed space though, so that a new version can be made openly available only after a certain stage of change has been reached. That was the main result and we're now going over to the prototypical concepts for something practical. Yes, based on these results and analyzed version management functions, we developed a prototype concept for managing versions and derivatives of OER with collaborative elements. We focused on requirements of users, relevant functions, intuitive usability, especially comprehensible terms and arrangements, as well as usage in practice. What we did focus on are design elements and technical implementation. The development of the prototype comprised four versions, including a three-stage iterative evaluation process. Based on the interview results, the first version was created and prepared for testing. The first user test was conducted with e-learning staff during a focus group workshop with 12 participants. This was followed by six individual sessions with higher education teachers who gave their feedback while running through different scenarios. After these results have been included into the prototype, the interview participants were asked to take part in a survey in order to validate their requirements and opinions from the interviews. Currently, we are finalizing the concept as a video, which is about to be published. The evaluation process resulted in some additional or adaptive functions, for example, regarding filtering different material types. Change comments were divided into mandatory or pre-selection and optional free text. The community space was developed and expanded as work in progress area. We also asked for comprehensible terms and visibility of processes. As we know, derivative is not a common term. We figured out suitable terms for replacing it and creating a derivative we describe as add-on version and overview as further versions. The concept involves views and functions regarding to add archive and merge versions as well as a community and the working space. In the following slides, I will present some examples. Here you can see a detailed view of the resource and its version history. The total resource gets a DOI automatically and for single versions, authors can optionally assign a DOI. Modifications are described with the pre-selection and detailed change comments can be specified. Here we have an example of Tony testing as an author of this resource and he can add a new version or archive order versions. In this view, Tony has edited a resource from another author and he would like to provide an own version. And by clicking on add new add-on version, a new resource with Tony as author is created and a link to the original resource is integrated here to indicate this as derivative and to remain a connection between these resources. And in the record of the original resource, all derivatives can be viewed under further versions. So they are merged there. And at last here is a brief look into the community space where work in progress materials can be shared and authors can ask for contributors. And in our evaluation, we asked how intuitive the functions are for users. And concerning this, we got quite good feedback as well as the practical applicability seems to be on the right track. To conclude, we have to admit that our study has some limitations due to the number of interview participants. We are pretty sure that there will be more requirements and functions which should be considered but couldn't be identified throughout our current research. And in addition, the evaluation took place in a predefined scenario and not under real conditions. As next step, we will publish a video presenting all functions as a start only in German. And a technical concept of the prototype with implementation in an OER repository is desired but out of scope of this research project. So and finally, we're interested in your individual situations so which OER platforms do teachers use at your institutions and do these platforms integrate version management functions or collaborative elements? And yeah, we can maybe we can discuss this at the end. Thank you for your attention and we are finished. Thank you. Thank you so much. Lovely. Just 15 minutes. We are right on time. Thank you so much for giving us five minutes extra so that we can add that to our question session. So thank you so much. Love your presentation. So much to learn from the work ongoing work. The default presentation is a pathway to learning international collaboration under COVID-19 by Robert Farrow et al. Okay. You're welcome. Okay. Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon. Good evening, depending on where you are. I'm Rob Farrow. I'm a senior research fellow in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. And today I'm going to talk to you about the GCRF Pathways project. So the Pathways project actually took place last summer and was very much like some of the other projects discussed today, a kind of pandemic response. And in this case, it was a collaboration between the Open University, several departments within the Open University. So that includes the Institute of Educational Technology, which is where I'm based, the International Development Office, the Faculty of Well-being, Education and Language Studies, and the School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport. And as well as several African institutions coordinated by the African Council for Distance Education. And these include Centre for Research and Distance and Non-Learning in Nigeria, the National Open University of Nigeria, the Open University of Tanzania, and the University of South Africa. And the idea behind this collaboration was to provide professional development and support for African educators during the pandemic. And one thing that I think was quite kind of interesting about this project was it was done on an agile basis. So everything happened pretty quickly. And if you're familiar at all with the way that course production normally works at the Open University, it takes many months to years to write courses and have them go through rounds of peer review and improvement. So while it did draw on expertise developed through that model, it was different to the way that courses are normally produced. So two courses were developed during this time. And in addition to the content itself, they were supported by various online events, which I'll go on to describe. So in total, there were people involved from 16 countries and more than 30 higher education institutions in Africa. So there's a big team on this project and a big list of co-authors, not proposing to go through all of them right now because there's quite a few. But everyone works in one of the places that I referred to on the previous slide. And we've got roughly half and half balance between UK-based and African-based people in the team. And in some ways, it was new territory for everyone involved in this. And when we got the funding to do this work, the concept behind it was we've already got a certain amount of open resources at the Open University. And we've got material around professional development and moving your teaching online and digitalization and so on. And the question was, how can we make the most of that and tailor it to this specific context and this set of needs? So two courses were developed, one for teacher educators and one for tertiary education. So the idea behind both of them was quite similar. So it's to support people who don't necessarily have any experience of teaching online and give them the support that they need to feel more confident doing that. So all of this was happening last summer. And in addition to the courses themselves being made available, there were around 12 webinars, each one around a specific area of expertise. And this is partly why the project team was quite big because people were brought in to deliver these webinars based on their own areas of expertise. But there are also some other sort of supplementary activities of things that just sort of developed as the initiative went on. I suppose I just want to offer a moment for people to reflect on their own situation. You've probably been doing this anyway as we've been talking about these different initiatives. But just thinking about the pandemic and the kind of unfolding picture there in terms of the impact on education. Generally speaking, there's been a move towards online education, even in areas that have traditionally been a bit resistant to that. But most of this has happened in a kind of crisis management way where people have just had to pivot into actually sort of doing what you shouldn't do a lot of the time, which is just basically trying to replicate your face-to-face teaching but in an online environment. So I think beyond these kind of groups that we were working with in sub-Saharan Africa, there's probably a lot of people out there who would benefit from a bit more guidance and a bit more support in how they've taken their teaching online during the pandemic. And I think also there's a question here around what an open response looks like to this. Because what's often happening is commercial organisations are moving into that online space and delivering solutions bundled proprietary resources to help people with their teaching. And that's understandable because people need solutions to the crisis that we're going through. And no one's finding it particularly easy necessarily to do this online teaching. But I think it is also an opportunity for developing an open response and building the right sort of networks, sharing in the right sort of ways. And I think this is part of what we should be thinking about when we talk about building capacity. It's not even just in your institution or in the institutions that you're working with but in a more general sense and in respect of the commons. So the idea behind what we're doing, the logic if you like, there are quite a lot of different sorts of demands on educators who are involved in this online pivot. And obviously in Africa, not everyone has reliable access to the internet. So this is another complicating factor. The Open University has quite a lot of open resources and a lot of expertise in teaching online and distance education. And we also have some quite innovative approaches to how to teach online and how to develop pedagogies for online education. And we have an international development office which historically has worked on these kind of projects as well which most universities don't have. So the idea behind all this was how can we make the most of these affordances and these OERs that we've already got and how can we work with these educators in Africa and develop their capacity for online learning. So the first source of content for the pathways courses is this badged open course which is on OpenLearn called Take Your Teaching Online. And this course is aimed at people who are coming from a face-to-face teaching background and are interested in moving to online provision. And obviously this dates from before the pandemic. But it has a lot of the same content that's relevant to people making that switch. Stuff around accessibility, stuff around the advantages or challenges of teaching online and delivering content in that way. And that's free for anyone to access and take. The second source is the TESA MOOC also available on OpenLearn. TESA stands for Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa. And again this predates the pandemic, about 16 hours of learning. And again focused on how to move in the direction of teaching online and using OER and improving accessibility and these kind of things. But in this case tailored towards African educators as specifically as teacher educators this course was developed for. So the idea was to draw on that content but go beyond it in a way to have a more sort of supported approach. So this included a series of different sort of webinars and presentations as well as asynchronous activities and communications. And as I'll explain shortly there were also some other things that just emerged out of what people were doing and people found their own ways to communicate around the content. So on this kind of rapid basis these two courses were produced. Each was about six weeks or so of e-learning and comprised of open materials and open course and a series of webinar events for each program. And then also different community activities. So in addition to the webinars that were there to support the content there were sort of guest speakers coming in to talk about different topics. We also used the Enquirer and R-Journey platforms. So the Enquirer platform is like a citizen science inquiry-led approach and the R-Journey approach is based around encouraging people to sort of record their emotional states and responses at different points to encourage a kind of reflection on how your learning journey is progressing and how it's developing. There was a forum and a telegram group emerged and it was really coming out of what people who were taking the course wanted to use. That was the platform that people were most interested in using. I don't know enough to say that that's what people in that area generally use. I'm not sure about that. But that was the thing that people said we want to communicate on this platform. So we did an evaluation which I'll present the results of shortly and that included pre and post surveys as well as interviews and metrics directly from the platform. And when we were going into sort of early phase of this, the challenges that we were kind of aware of were first of all, it's not a one size fits all thing, but we're going to have to make it that right. So there's quite diverse audiences that we were developing this content for. But we have to sort of just on a rapid basis produce it and hope that it hits the right notes, but also have a little bit of responsiveness to how people were receiving it so that we could make adjustments if needed. We also didn't know who the audience was going to be necessarily because it was happening so quickly that there wasn't time to research who's the market for this and who's, you know, who are our learners and let's model what kind of experiences they're going to have. In addition, because everyone is essentially stuck at home just doing stuff on Zoom and through the VLE and that kind of thing, how do we create a sense of community? How do we make sure that people feel that they're part of some bigger cohort? And this was done primarily through the webinars and through the asynchronous activities. So what does it look like to be on these courses? Well, it might look a bit familiar, the old Zoom webinar. In some ways, the Zoom conference call is one of the distinctive experiences of the pandemic for a lot of people and it's arguably a surprisingly common experience around the world because it's become the kind of dominant way of doing things. So in this case, much as we're doing today, combinations of slide-based presentations plus webinars and an interesting sense of telepresence perhaps with the sort of conference calling and being able to see people's faces, which doesn't always happen that way. And again, maybe contributes towards a bit more of a sense of community. So most of the time, there would be content supported by activities and these guest speakers. Quite a lot of different stuff that was covered and quite a lot of moving in different directions and bringing in these different experiences because with so many different authors and different experts delivering content on the course was in some ways maybe asking quite a lot of people to take in so much in one go with all these different platforms, different pedagogical approaches and different technologies. So overall, there were about nearly 1400 registrations across the two courses. This only applies to the initial presentation. So this is just who signed up at first for the initial presentation. And we had about 16 countries, more than 30 HEIs. Just under half of the people in the first wave were coming from Nigeria and between a quarter and a third from Kenya. Those two numbers, the disparity represents the two different courses that were presented. So who was taking the course? What was their starting point? So just over three quarters already had some experience of teaching online, but not necessarily as a teacher. So most of them were coming from the point of view of having done some online learning. Just over 10% had already taken another free OU course. And what was the consistent picture, if you like, was that people were saying that they're already experiencing a big change in how they're doing their job because of the way that they're moving towards online learning in the pandemic. And you can see from the information in the table here. So whereas about a third, we're doing purely face-to-face and roughly a third, we're doing mostly face-to-face. Before the pandemic, those numbers came right down to sort of six, seven, eight percent. Whereas during the pandemic, 42% of people were teaching purely at a distance, another 12.5%, mostly at a distance. Before that was only a quarter of the entire cohort. So you can see that people were already, if you like, in the midst of that pivot and in the midst of that move to online learning when they started taking the pathways courses. One thing that's kind of interesting is, I said 700 people on one course and 600 on the other roughly. What happened is this content remains online. It's unsupported in the sense that there isn't the regular webinars, but you can go and view the stuff that was recorded. So the initial presentation, by the time we got to sort of August, July, August last year, they'd already finished, they'd done the six weeks of their course or whatever. But only updates are going up to January this year, but you can see a massive spike, ongoing registrations and people continuing to be awarded badges by completing the course. I think this is quite an interesting thing where this isn't even supported, if you like, in the same way that the original presentation was. This is just content now, but there's still a lot of people going and taking those courses and working through them. You could say it's a response to the ongoing need for support in the pandemic, but it just goes to show you that once you make these things open, people do continue to take them. So this chart shows you the pattern of activity over the initial presentation. So the dark blue line is if you like people going through and ticking the box each week, each activity to say, yes, I've done this. And you can see that they went from about 500 to just around just under 300 by the end. Those are the people who have basically been through everything and ticked the boxes to say, yes, I've read this, I've done this activity and so on. This is for the tertiary education course. But if you look at the orange line and the kind of turquoise teal line, those represent the zoom activities. So those were always more popular than people working through the course content. And it goes to show that there are some people who are basically just dropping in for those parts of it, and they didn't necessarily want to take the course that they wanted the support of the community and to hear what was being said in the presentation sessions. You cannot see the yellow line is people who were going back and viewing stuff afterwards. So after things have been recorded and made available, people were also going back and watching them later. This is the same graph for the other course, the teacher educator and very similar pattern. You have the dark blue line showing people working through the course, a little bit of attrition as you'd expect. And then the zoom presentations in orange and turquoise. So a pretty good pattern of engagement overall. Alongside the synchronous sessions, we had a forum for the teacher education course, not for the tertiary education course, because it's on a different platform. I mentioned Telegram before. There's probably people here who know more about this than me, but it seemed that Telegram was popular in the African countries that were involved in the courses. And that just basically had a life of its own, right? So it wasn't moderated in any way by anyone who was involved in presenting the courses. But nearly a thousand messages, my observation is they were sort of good quality messages, like detailed discussion and people being quite open and honest. And I think this was a very useful and sort of confidence building aspect of what was going on. We didn't plan for that, right? That was just something that emerged from the activities. In the evaluation, people were asked whether they were satisfied with what they were offered in these courses. You can see here that in excess of 90 percent either agreed or strongly agreed that they were satisfied. Obviously, it's important to note that's a self-selecting response. Similar picture when people were asked about the impact on their practice. So you can see here more than 90 percent said yes a lot or yes somewhat to whether the material they'd been engaging with and the activities were going to influence their practice. People said yes, they believe that it would. We collected quite a lot of qualitative data. So what comes out of that in terms of the themes that people mentioned when they were talking about what the impact would be on their own institution. You've got things like a change in how teaching is organized or how learning is designed. There was also quite a lot of interest in assessment and how assessment would work online. And you can see on the right hand side it was the most common thing that people said they were interested in moving forward was to understand how assessment would work in a distance learning scenario. Other things that people mentioned. I guess feeling slightly galvanized to explore new kinds of approaches, new activities, new ways to upskill. Having more support for personal development and engaging in external training. There's also a lot of interest in openness and becoming a champion for open approaches in their own institution or for digitalization. And more generally I think feeling empowered to enact change or to start the process of criticizing and looking for ways to improve the way that things are done. And these were all key goals for the courses. So just to summarize, this project was definitely a success and I think people on all sides of it did some important learning about how things might work in a post-pandemic situation. There isn't a report available on the Open University's repository. I'll put a link on to the schedule for anyone who wants to see it. In some ways the main outcome was this sense of improved confidence. Partly confidence in dealing with online learning but also confidence for educators in themselves to be agents of change and to being in control of the process of designing learning and trying out different approaches and being innovative in the kind of culture. One thing that's important to note is that the amount of flexibility mattered. So partly it's about people's access to the internet. Partly it's about other pressures on people's time and time differences and that kind of thing. So the more flexible that we could be, the more that was appreciated. That does have implications for your balance between synchronous and asynchronous. I said there was some attrition but overall about two-thirds of the people who signed up originally completed the programs. Once we finished the initial presentation there were quite a lot of people who continued to access those materials. Maybe the people got bombarded with a bit too much because when the courses were being put together it was very inclusive. You could probably have filled an MA or something with the amount of content people were being introduced to if you were to do it in a bit more detail. Sometimes people said they just didn't have the bandwidth to engage with everything such as these new platforms that I mentioned. I mentioned before that assessment and OER were of particular interest to people. Another area that was valued was learning design and I guess specifically learning design for online learning rather than for face-to-face because that's an area where it's actually quite difficult to get that support I think. As I mentioned, one of the key things is this shifting confidence and greater willingness to experiment as the people are moving forward with online and blended approaches. Just to finish up an update on what's happening with this work now. I mentioned before that the assessment and online assessment was of particular interest and this was highlighted in the evaluation. Some money has been made available internally and the sort of evolution of this work is that there is now a new pathways aspect which is this E assessment for African higher education and the link's there on the slide. There's already my slides are linked on the schedule if you want to go and read more about it but this is basically an ongoing work. There's ongoing events and outputs relating to this so it's become a kind of ongoing strand of work whereas originally it was just a kind of very time-bound short project. It's proven to have a life beyond that so quite interesting that you can do this kind of agile rapid response stuff and it can continue and kind of get a life of its own. Overall the project's been pretty successful I would say. I just have to offer the slight caveat that I'm just a small part of this project. I don't know everything about what's been going on in it and the person who's now leading this work is Professor Denise Wolock who's the director of the Institute of Educational Technology but I will do my best to answer any questions about it that you might have. Thank you. Yeah thank you Rob. Thank you for this wonderful presentation and I thank everybody for your patience and for listening attentively. Yes my work now is to draw on the presentations and the comments but before that I'm required to provide a summary of the presentations which I'm going to do in less than three minutes or so. So the first presentation was on framework for categorizing digital learning materials by Ben Janssen and Robert Shaw. Interestingly the presentation focused not only on digital education resources not only on OER but generally on digital education resources including open educational resources and this framework was adopted by David Weill framework David Weillay his framework and the presenters categorized this framework using two dimensions assess and adaptation right and presenting an interesting framework it highlights adaptation right from the know to the most adaptable position and also using this framework it gives the users the opportunity to categorize the following types of digital learning resource or understand the following types of digital learning resource. Sorry there's a fly really on my head. Yes and open education resources these are presented in four categories open educational resources open educational resources semi open resources commercial resources and their closed resources and the presentation concluded with interesting findings and remarks so that's that for the first one then the second presentation is on go open supporting higher education staff engagement in open education practices and there is in heartwarming to note that this project was inspired two years ago by the open education global conference and there observed collaborative experiences and project presented in the conference between the librarians and other faculty staff and they're looking in what they got back to their institution and also observed pockets of similar project but they took the time to see if they could work towards that and elaborate that the month and the question posed where how do we try to hook the interest of people not previously practitioners in open education how do we try to gain their interest in this project and in further clarification of concepts they try to clarify some content that could be a bit intimidating to new entrants to open education concepts like open pedagogy open education policy and so on and they also noted that the online underlining ideas is to start from the basics provide practical examples and good links and also to get people to understand and embrace the beauty of open education and the reason is to go open they provided the following reasons some of the following reasons it saves money it brings real-world examples and it saves also the time we're using existing materials and contributes to broadening access to education and four ways to go open suggested by the presentations where participants were required to share their open practice deposit their work in open repositories use the cc licensing the creative common licensing and use open educational resources and the presentation concluded with interesting recommendations for the recommendations the third presentation is on designing infrastructure allowing high education teachers to reuse adapt and exchange open educational resources it is a research project basically on educational architecture as I understand basically looking at finding OERs and technical infrastructure for open educational resources and the research study focused on expectations and need of open educational resources as well as collaboration and utilizing the version management and OER they presented different concepts arising from the platform they showed of the those concepts that will give us further insight on the platform and their vision to and research questions looked at areas on OER activities requirements and needs version management functionalities and so on and also the participants withdrew from 23 German speaking participants teachers six from national natural science 11 from humanities and the social sciences and the study was conducted between July to September 2020 in the peak of the pandemic and the results also provided some insightful findings looking at the feedback the community collaborative and and so on and the last one is the pathway project by Rob and Eta it is a collaboration between the OUUK and the ACDE African Council for Distance Education institutions affiliated to the African Council for Distance Education and the objective is to provide professional development and support for African open education during the pandemic and we also observed that two courses were designed during this process and it involved 16 countries and more than 30 higher education institutions in Nigeria and the courses run for over six weeks from July to August 2020 and there's some reflections and questions where what does an open response look like what to what is the long-term impact what do the long-term impact mean for educators and professional development and what are the longer-term impact of pandemic to education these are some of the questions and another one is that some of the questions noted and the overall insight was that the pandemic provides us with opportunity to build on open responses to education and specifically mentioning the course the one is taking your teaching online free course and the second one is a TESA course that tailored towards teacher education specifically for African teachers in Africa and they also identified key challenges they noted that coordination across institutions and countries were quite challenging and they had difficulty predicting the number of registrations and activities and also one that if participants will really understand what the course is all about but the chairing in news is that the pre and the post survey were quite significant positively so the observations made in the pre survey were there were more significant views towards the post survey and this indicates the gain in this area and this was also confirmed by the presenter of the evidence of the huge success of this course so that is my summary I want to invite my co-host to I don't know if she was able to help identify the questions and we're going to take it one after the other we're going to add your questions linked to the first presentation the one the first presentation on a framework for categorizing digital learning materials are there questions specifically for them I'm supposed to have my co-facilitator yeah is that I'm the rapporteur I might I might be that as well well there was one question I don't know if it's still wanted from Derek who asked can digital resources be offline and would that affect the accessibility access criteria I don't know if you want to say more about that Derek cool I thanks very much I thought these response to it linking to a post about Schrodinger's cat was a was a fairly articulate response so I feel like it's been answered with with a with another question and that's fine okay I think James okay okay no any other questions for the first presentation okay so the second one go open supporting higher education staff engagement in open educational practices any questions for them we love talking everyone do you love talking most people here know somebody another another of the team came along amen yeah just to rope you in amen so we have three on that were you able to collect your questions because you were really I think I answered one but if there's if there's more we'd be happy to yeah there was the one question about incentivization and like really we're and we were discussing it in the chat we're really still pushing at the intrinsic like trying to just show people you know if they've ever been bothered by the students not reading the stuff or they've ever been they've heard about this idea yeah why are we just like making students do assessments and then dumping them at the end of the year and never doing anything with them and going well wouldn't it be cool if we did like get the students to do something that went out in the real world or they were engaged with the real world a bit more if you get them if they have a half a thought like that and you can grab them you know we're trying to increase that intrinsic motivation to solve a problem they're seeing or solve a frustration they're having but like little bits of funding never does any harm either like Orna was saying and half of it is if someone gives you even a small amount of funding the drive to not lose it by not doing the project on time is is a pretty good you know psychological driver and so that that bit of support and then obviously we were talking about in the in the chat the big thing is academic culture and productivity metrics and promotion metrics and frameworks need to you know respect and uh what's the word rewards give credit for you know engaging in teaching and learning practice especially things like uh open educational practices open science all that you know all that kind of stuff if that's recognized more people will do it more because when you're completely strapped for time and you're doing 20 things at the same time you know you will use the frameworks you've been given you know in terms of this framework says if you're doing your job or not that says engage in teaching and learning innovation engage in open education practices people do the more yeah and it's also the problem sometimes in some institutions like our own uh that's uh developing open educational resources isn't necessarily counted as publication um so there are some some factors like that i'm sure everyone can relate to okay thank you so much we have further clarifications yeah okay so let's go to the type presentation uh designing infrastructure allowing higher education teachers to reuse adapt and exchange open educational resources do we have specific questions for this group uh sorry i i couldn't track the question i was busy uh yes um i think most of it was discussions going on in the chat rather than um questions so probably best if we just ask if anybody still has a question um to uh to shout out now yes i have one question uh because i i i i i i love the thinking about version or we are because i think that this is a big problem which which you have do lovely things in solving that one thing i was asking myself how do you keep track of versions that arise outside of the repository yeah that's a really good question so um we um we didn't include this issue in in this concept yeah but we we have to think about it that's fine yeah okay thank you yeah do we have more questions for group three okay then the last presentation uh the pathway project do we have specific questions for this group the pathway project i i just want one for Rob yeah i'm just curious about the assessment one Rob so is that kind of a spin-off you're on mute thank you um basically yes uh it's a spin-off it wasn't part of the original um concept the original concept was really quite limited right it was very rapid turnaround i think the whole thing was two months the whole the entire project um and six weeks of that was was delivery so um it all happened very quickly um i'm not involved with the ongoing work around assessment um but my impression is so many people said this is the area that we need help with um that we've tried to sort of respond and meet that need um and um the specifics of it i'm not entirely sure right but i imagine the general drive of it would be moving away from kind of automated quiz-based stuff and into more kind of complex assignments and so the question is how do you facilitate that like this is a general issue for online learning i would say um so i imagine that's the direction that it's going in it's going there was authentic assessments um maybe reusable stuff i don't know um it's possible is that i think i sure anything Rob because i'd be curious and linking up with whoever is involved in that bit yeah i'll just put the link in the chat hang on thanks Rob okay uh Derek yeah i think your hand is up thanks thanks Rob i i enjoyed the presentation and i also attended your presentations yesterday and and you mentioned the SAMA framework and to me it seems as if there are two issues that kind of define your audience maybe one being uh um there perhaps at the substitution phase where they're really just looking for an alternate to being in person and on campus and really looking just to substitute face to face with a lot with with straight zoom um uh um synchronous teaching and maybe that defines your audience and then the other thing that defines the audience is perhaps those who can afford to actually pay the the costs of data um um because if you're working from home then you don't have institutional uh um sponsorship for for accessing the internet um and and it is really expensive to to for for the average phone user to to pay for data here in Africa um i i also think it is interesting to see that shift into assessment because to me that points to maybe some movement from SAMA where they're actually starting to ask how can we augment our teaching using online type of stuff and that's a really interesting avenue i think yeah um yeah thanks for that i think um i am i am sort of uh i am sort of focused on the SAMA framework at the moment um and how we can kind of use it to describe different OER adoption situations um and i think in some ways pandemic response for most people was just like okay first of all how do i survive in this new environment how do i manage to carry on doing what i'm doing but then um as you get people used to this uh alternative way of doing things they start to see new possibilities and they start to think okay so could i do it this way could i do it that way i think the focus on learning design is part of that progression so people go from okay i'm just in the midst of it i'm doing the teaching you know i'm doing it in this slightly uncomfortable new way but um through learning design people start to be sort of take a step back and conceptualize what they're doing in a slightly more abstract way slightly more meta way um and that can be a route to new affordances and new ways of looking at things um so yeah i find that useful and i think um with the access side i'm not i'm not an expert on uh people's internet access in sub-saharan africa one thing i remember that was happening was um people would only be online at certain times of day right because the the system just wasn't online like 24 hours a day it was like if you have a webinar you need to try and hold it at a time when people's uh internet's turned on and that kind of thing um so uh so one uh sort of by-product from that was the need to factor in more asynchronous uh opportunities so that we weren't dependent on people having access at a particular time to be able to participate um and so the more flexible you could make it the more chance there was for people to be able to engage and participate so that was definitely one of the sort of learning outcomes for us is like the more flexible you make it the better um so yeah um that has implications for your formats your technologies that you're using the timing of things um uh how you organize the assessments and activities and that sort of thing so so yeah more flexible the better for this audience it seems thank you it's probably true for most audiences though yeah thank you so much I think I can relate to your comments on the accessibility the data issue in Africa and I also appreciate the fact that the cost is as flexible as possible and more asynchronous because data here is quite is a different story and it's not predictable okay I'm really surprised that I'm still holding on one other comment just quickly on this um is awareness that a lot of people are using their mobile device to access the internet as well so we had to sort of design for that and the fact that people might not be at a desktop machine at home or whatever they might just be on a mobile and that's their main way of accessing the internet so that had some implications for how we approached it as well yeah likewise for our students the main way for accessing internet is through their mobile phone so I'm glad you took note of that so Derek you wanted to say something the challenge would be how do you teach um the learning design through mobile phones um well as far as I'm aware the open learn platform has been designed to be accessible by phone a lot of the open universities resources are designed for accessibility and they go through various rounds of auditing and peer review to make sure they are as accessible as possible so um so yeah I guess you can do it um I wasn't personally involved in that side of it but assuming that it meets the standards we have for other stuff then should be okay but I think it has implications for how you design tasks and you know how much text you're expecting people to read in one go and that sort of stuff all right so I think we have uh we're supposed to end the in 20 23 minutes so but we can we can actually close early right so I want to thank everyone for your time your presentations for active participation and we are also going to share the link of the OED connect where a chat window so that the participants can continue the discussions there so um secretary any other thing for us are we good to close the session yes thank you everyone for being here it's been an amazing session very interesting with everything that's been put on on the actual page I put um all the links that we've been that you have been sharing with us and the chat will also be shared but thank you everyone for being here it's been really great and um Jane do you want to close yeah not too much so just to thank everyone again for very active presentations and participations I'm sure we learned so much from this interesting session okay so take care stay safe and greetings from Nigeria hi everyone bye thank you thank you


We had a strong curtain of storms come through. We had some severe winds, we had some medium sized hail. We've got quite a few trees down, some power outages. The Sapella County's actually got it worse than us. We have quite a few trees on the roofs and I'm trying to check on some of those. I'm trying to get that taken care of and all the different fire departments are out right now getting the highways cleared. And power companies are getting the parapoles back where they should be. We came out pretty good but we didn't get some damage.


I'm very happy that the 1st CAF is here with the Infantry Fighting Vehicles. We do not have Infantry Fighting Vehicles ourselves, but we are planning to procure them. So everything we can learn from the 1st CAF, how to train with them, is important for our Defence Forces. I hope they're experienced how to operate and train with a heavier armour because we don't have it ourselves. And I think I really hope that there will be a personal friendship between the soldiers as well. I hope that the US unit will remain here in Estonia, and I am looking forward to see other Allied units training together with Estonians to show our aggressive neighbours we are ready to fight together if necessary to defend Allies territory.


We would ask people to be especially cautious to drive a little bit slower because this is the time of year when we have mudslides and rock falls. The freeze-thaw cycle in the wintertime has caused the earth to loosen and it can come down at any time. Fortunately we've been very blessed in the 18 years that I've been with Highway District 12 that we have had very little property damage and no injuries to people because of mudslides or rock falls. But that could change and we want people to be alert and be cautious out there.