Good morning and welcome to your news update. The DAX went up by a hundred points yesterday. The pound went up from 120 versus the US dollar to went 124 There were series of maim Given the speech as we all know in my opinion, it wasn't how the press interpreted the speech It wasn't that this hard and cold Brexit will come No matter what the consequences that was the expectation up front that was why the pound went down so strongly in my opinion that was not the takeaways from that speech the takeaways from that speech is that she still wants to have Maximum access to the single market without being a member of the single market So there will be some backs and forths and there's still some room in those negotiations and theories may in my opinion has shown that she is very very open to To any negotiations So there will be no hard and cold Brexit coming and that is my opinion The reason why the pound went up in ten days There will be the Chinese New Year seeks in pin the Chinese president visited friends in Davos as he said yesterday He held a very value-oriented speech yesterday That is in comparison to Trump who is a very business focused politician He does not do any value politics and at the same time They were Chinese officials and academics trying to reach out to Trump to help interpret remarks that he Has made in the past days, especially those regarding Taiwan There were two newspapers out of China state-driven newspapers That said that they will take off the cloths if Trump continues to be as talk as he did and That was a mixture of very soft seeks in pin president speech in Davos and very harsh articles in the press and in the media so clear communication there is a There is a clear stop for for China and that seems to be the one China question Putin at the same time said that US intelligent agencies must have practiced in the Ukraine And now they do the same tried to make a soft coup against Trump in Washington That's what Trump what Putin said and that's also Trump's opinion that the sent the intelligent agencies are somehow working against him or somehow like along those lines the vix and that is a stonish It's astonishing still the vix volatility index for the S&P 500 indexes near Is very low and the positioning is A near record shorts that are in those markets So if you have near record shorts in a volatility index, it means that everyone expects that there will be Sailing going on in the equity markets, but it's that probable Trump has said that before he was elected that equities are in a huge bubble and Now Trump has another market Analysis going out and that is that the US dollar is too strong. It's killing the US industry He said in an interview with with the Wall Street Journal that leaked out yesterday The reason regarding according to Trump is not the Federal Reserve Which is norm trying to normalize their monetary policy. It's not the US economy But it's the Chinese you won It's dropping like a stone is that and that is the reason why the US dollar is so strong


Hello, everyone. I'm Meredith and welcome to our webinar today, Engaging Online, Teaching and Learning with the SDG Academy. As you know, you've joined us. We are the SDG Academy, who's on the call with us today. We have Florencia Liberzi, the head of partnerships, Shannon Cobren, who is an education manager, and myself. Today, we are coming to you at this time from our homes, like many of you. Just because our classrooms have changed doesn't mean the quality and delivery of our course content needs to suffer at all. So we'd like to start by introducing you to some of our resources, which we hope can support you and your syllabi and your teaching agendas throughout the course of academic year 19 and 20, but also beyond for any additional kind of outreach opportunities, engagement opportunities, research opportunities that you might find in this content. Some housekeeping issues before we begin, just some points I'd like to bring your attention to. Right now, there are 29 attendees active in this call. If you would like to raise your hand throughout this process, there's a hand raising button in the ribbon that you can press in order to raise your hands so we can see if you have a question. But for a group of the sides, if you'd like to just submit your question in the question section on that same ribbon, I can either answer directly to you or if it's a question that you'd like to say for the discussion at the end, then we can broach the question across the whole group. We'll take a couple of moments in the middle for yes or no quick questions to make sure that we're covering all of the material that you understand, and then a longer section at the end to get to the beefier source of questions that you might have in dealing with the content. So to begin with our agenda, yeah, we've had our welcome. We'd just really like to welcome you all to engaging with the SDG Academy today, and hopefully there will be some resources that you can find, some takeaways here that you can work with for the future. Next, I'll cover the learning objectives. Florencia will then give a brief introduction to the SDG Academy and to sustainable development. And Shannon will begin an introduction to the SDG Academy resources, which will include ideas on how to use the SDG Academy resources in your teaching. From there, we'll move to a question and answer if you could facilitate those questions through the side panel questions. And then at the close, Florencia will discuss how to get more involved with the SDG Academy. So to begin, when we discuss the learning objectives, there are a number of things that we are going to do in this webinar, which you can see here. But I'd also like to note that there are a number of things that we will not be doing in this webinar. We're not going to discuss online learning ground rules, switching to e-learning, the more technical things that we're sure you're getting tons of input and advice from your own university or your own learning institution. We're not going to tell you the best practice for your own classroom or your own region, etc. And we're not going to push an agenda for the SDG Academy or our own partnerships. This is a resources based discussion. And what we want to do is really highlight these objectives that we have listed here. So what will be covered is the wide range of academic subjects that our content covers, the types of resources available through the SDG Academy, how to search for video resources in our SDG Academy library, how to navigate our MOOCs on the edX platform, different strategies for integrating our content into your online lessons and steps you can take to maximize your engagement and creativity with the resources that we've shared with you today. So again, if you have any questions, please send those directly to me in the questions ribbon. Otherwise, Florencia, if you'd like to begin with the SDG Academy overview. Absolutely. Thank you, Meri. Thank you, everyone to join us and welcome. I'm very pleased to connect with all of you and bring you closer to our work, hoping that the SDG Academy resources will be helpful, will be timely and effective for you to engage online your students and create a meaningful teaching and learning experience. As many of you might know, and I see that there are different groups of people in this webinar, some of you are part of SDSM, some of you are new to us. So I'd be happy to tell you that the SDG Survey Sustainable Development Solution Network, SDSM, was launched in 2012 by former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. So the main objective was to mobilize global scientific and technological expertise to promote practical solutions on sustainable development, including the implementation of the SDGs, as well as the Paris Climate Agreement. So to fulfill our mandate, we work very closely with UN, with the private sector, with academia and society, as a society, largely. So the SDG Academy, which is the initiative in which we're working, is the flagship education initiative of SDSM, with the mandate of creating and curating the best available educational content on sustainable development and making sure that we provide it for a global public good. So the SDG Academy was launched in 2016, with the goal of becoming the world's leading creation and curation site for educational content on the SDGs. And currently, the initiative has garnered over 300,000 enrollment across its platform and for over 180 countries. And it's our aim that we're going to continue to reach more and more people. And we hope that this is also going to be helpful to you and you're going to circulate with your network. So we really want to reach millions. So and we believe that that's the way that we are empowering this generation and the next to achieve sustainable development. So as you know, sustainable development has been defined in many, many ways. But most frequently, a quality definition is it comes from the from our common future, or as well as known as our Brunner Report. So, and it defines sustainable development as a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. And in that sense, we, you might remember that until 2015, we had the Millennial Development Goals. And as they were expiring in September 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals were launched at the UN, adopted by 193 member states. And the entities are very important because they provide the shared global blueprint for peace, for prosperity for people and for the planet. And these 17 goals are extremely interconnected and interdisciplinary. And they constitute an urgent goal for action to global partnership, as we've seen in 2017, to really tackle the biggest and the most challenging issues of our time, ranging from poverty to inequality, climate change, and many, many others. So these are some of the subjects that the SDG cover. And just like the SDG cover these items, we ensure that our repertoire of over 30 MOOCs also cover them. So it is really my hope and of my team that diligently put this webinar together, that this webinar will help you at this difficult time with COVID-19 with the pandemic outbreak to create a disengaging online learning experience that we need. And it's my personal hope that we will face this crisis together in partnership with a renewed commitment to the SITs. And that by accelerating sustainable development solutions, including online education, we will ensure that the decade of action is really one that will lead us to achieve the SITs. So without further ado, I pass it over to my colleagues. Thank you. Thank you very much, Florence. Yeah, I see there's one person that says they're having problems with their sound. So perhaps if you'd like to exit the meeting and then re-enter, or if you'd like to just pause for a second and then try to refresh. One other thing to highlight as we're moving forward with this resources discussion, again, thank you Florence for the context, is that there's a handouts section in the command ribbon. In the handout section, you'll be able to access the document that lists all of the SDG Academy MOOCs and all of the lessons within each syllabus. So this is the overview document that you could see there that we had circulated in advance of the call. But that's just something to note as an additional resource. But Shannon, would you like to go ahead with the rest of the content? Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Shannon Cobrain. I'm another education manager here with the Academy, and I want to give you a brief overview of some of the resources that we'd like to share with you today. In particular, we have our SDG Academy Library, and then our MOOCs that Florence had mentioned earlier. If you're not familiar with the term MOOC, it's an acronym for Massive Open Online Course. And that basically is just a completely online, publicly available educational experience that is open to anyone so can have thousands of people enrolled in it at a single time. We have produced nearly 30 MOOCs now on subjects related to the SDGs and the sustainable development field in collaboration with experts in these fields through our networks and through our connections to organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank and other universities. And we host our MOOCs on a platform called edX, which is one of the world's largest online learning platforms with about 24 million registered users. So our MOOCs are primarily made up of video lectures featuring these experts in our network. And then what we've done is taken all of the videos from our MOOCs and put them into our SDG Academy Library, which is like a private YouTube for the SDGs. It's all of the videos available in this searchable format. So I can give you a quick. This is the URL for it. It's also available in that handout that Meredith mentioned. So no need to copy it down right now if you don't have the time. I should also note that everyone should be getting a recording of this webinar after we finish. So if there's anything that you have missed or want to take another look at later, you should be receiving a copy of a video of this recording of this webinar. But let me give you a little preview here or a little quick look at our SDG Academy Library. This is what it looks like. So you can see all of the categories that we have our videos organized by. You can if you want to look for videos in a particular course and you can find more details on the different courses that we offer in that handout that Meredith mentioned. If you want to look by course, you can look here. This is a list of all of our courses organized alphabetically. And then you can find the videos associated with those courses there. You can also search by lecture. We have several hundred experts and different academics and practitioners from across the world who have participated in our courses. If you do like using the SDG framework as a way to teach or think about your content, you can look for content based on which SDG that it's related to. And obviously because it's an interdisciplinary subject, many of our videos are linked to more than one SDG. And then what might be most useful for many of you as educators, particularly in a university context, is we have here content organized by academic subjects. So it's not it's not comprehensive. It's missing a couple of things right now that we hope to add in a minute. But this is also a good way to find content that is relevant to courses that you might be teaching. So this homepage here, we have a couple featured playlists that we think is content that we want to highlight or is particularly relevant at the moment like courses from our global public health course, videos from our global public health course, and then trailers for all of the full length MOOCs that you can find on edX. So a little bit more about what these videos look like when you find one that you'd like to see. So you go in here, I've looked for a video from one of our MOOCs. So this is what it looks like. And every every one of the lecture videos, we have a couple of different types of videos on here. The majority of them are are fully produced lecture videos from our courses. And every one of those should have at minimum an English language transcript. The transcripts are available for download. You can do that right here, or you can print it directly. And you can get different closed captions or subtitles. Many of our videos have transcripts or subtitles in additional languages as well. And you can find that by clicking this button here and seeing what languages are available. So the transcripts are downloadable. The videos themselves are also downloadable. And we think that is important for people who might be teaching in context where there's not reliable access to Internet or maybe your students don't have reliable access to Internet. So when they can access Internet, they can download the videos and then view them offline. If that's something that they need. So you can do that by clicking this little button here. You can also share a link to this page or embed the video in an existing platform. So if you're working with a learning management system like Canvas or Moodle or Blackboard, these might be useful links for you as well. So here's a direct link to the media page. And this is still having trouble loading, but you should see an embed code here if you want to put it in an existing platform. I said earlier that the majority of our videos here are fully produced lecture videos. We also have some things like these on the side here, which are Q&As. We've run a variety of live sort of Q&A sessions with different faculty from our courses where they've answered student questions through the public MOOC environment. And we have recordings of some of those and those do not have transcripts. So I just want to be transparent about that. Another thing to note with our transcripts, that again we want to be transparent, is that we are a small nonprofit. And because of that, the majority of our transcripts and our translations of our transcripts have been produced with volunteers. We don't unfortunately don't have the capacity to do that in-house and we also don't have the capacity to do a lot of quality control. So please use as much of it as you can. But if you find errors or something you think is not properly translated, do let us know because we want to make that as available as possible and as accurate as we can. But just something to keep in mind in terms of how much we can guarantee anything's accuracy because we are working primarily with volunteers. Another thing to note about the content here, both the content of the videos themselves and of everything in the full length MOOCs, which I'll show you in a minute, is that this content was designed for to be pitched at, we say, about an introductory master's level. And so that's, our content is available to a really wide audience. We have students who are currently enrolled in university or graduate programs. We have lifelong academics, practitioners, government officials, lifelong learners of every sort, people who are just members of the public who want to be better educated on these subjects, but we are primarily working with adult learners of various sorts. If you are teaching a younger group of students, I think you know your students best. Take a look at our content and decide whether you think that they can handle it, how you want to structure a lesson around it. Maybe if you are working with younger students, high school students or early university students, maybe use that as a way to really delve deep into a subject and watch the video and then craft a whole conversation around it. But I also want to make sure that we're all aware of sort of who these videos were designed for and then you can use your best judgment on whether or not they're appropriate for your students. You can also use them to educate yourself if there's a subject you'd like to know more about so that you can then teach it to younger group students. So that is a brief preview of everything we have in the library. I also want to show everyone a little bit more about the MOOCs themselves. So you can access our MOOCs on edX.org. Like I said, that's one of the world's largest online learning platforms. Switch back to our demo. Sorry, my computer froze just a bit. So this is our page on edX. Everyone on edX is a University X partner. That's how they brand their partners. So edX has partnerships with universities and global institutions around the world all putting on very different types of content. And as Florencia said, our content is geared around the SDGs and the field of sustainable development. So if you would like to find us, we're at SDG Academy X, you can look for us here in the search bar. And this is just a page of all of the courses that are currently available. So I'm going to show you the inside of one of our courses here called Tech for Good. That's our course on technology and international development which deals with the way that technology is being used in different fields of development, like delivering health care, education, what kind of infrastructure is needed to make sure that everyone has access to all of these new technologies. And then also what are some of the pitfalls or challenges of using these technologies to create a better world. So that's what this course deals with and was created with our partners at UNESCO. So you can see here that our courses are divided into what we call modules which if you were teaching this as a semester long course, think of a module as a week's worth of content. In every one of our courses is organized slightly differently because they were all produced with different partners or at different times, but for the most part a module of content is going to include the video chapters. We call our lectures chapters and each video is roughly 10 minutes of content. So that is our expert speaking on screen. There's also B-roll footage that helps sort of give context or illustrate what they're talking about. There may be graphs or charts in the video as well or relevant websites or materials that the lecturer wants to showcase and those are all included in the videos. Most of our courses also include readings, either required readings or just a big list of additional resources that are there to help contextualize and have supplementary material to the videos. Many of our courses also include an interactive activity which I can show you in a minute and then also discussion prompts to help the global cohort of students engage around these issues and connect with each other in this MOOC environment. I'll also note that the video chapters often have comprehension questions, usually multiple choice or true-false to help students gauge their own understanding of the content and every course includes at least a final exam also based around multiple choice or true-false questions. Our intention with these because they are publicly available courses they're there for people to to elevate their own learning. The assessments are not as rigorous as you may have in a formal classroom, so please feel free to take a look, borrow what you would like, but just know that they were not designed to be in a formal learning environment. So let's dive into what one of these modules looks like here. When you go in, this is a video chapter from our Tech for Good course. This is the module on measurement and using data to measure different changes in technology around the world. So you can see just like in the library there are transcripts in various languages which you can access here. Just like in the library the video files and the transcript files are downloadable so anything that people need to view offline they can find here. This course has the comprehension questions underneath each video. Some other courses have them all gathered together kind of like a quiz at the end of the week but every course will have some form of comprehension questions. So the videos really are the core part of every module's worth of activities but like I said there's also readings, there are links to relevant websites and activities. Not every course features these type of activities but I wanted to give you a preview because I think that they could be useful for you when you're designing your own online learning experiences. So again this is the module on data and one of the lectures talks about the importance of communicating data and using data visualization to help people really understand and make use of all the data that's out there because if people can't understand what they're looking at then it's never going to make a difference. So what we've done here is linked out to a website called GapMiner. This is not something we created. This is a freely available resource online that is a data visualization tool and for this one in particular we were able to embed it straight in the course. Some other things are just linked but we encourage students to go to them and explore the resource and then we have a prompt or some steps that the students can take to explore this resource, understand how it works and then there is a discussion prompt so students can reflect on their experience and the intention behind this is so that students can play around with this cool tool that is available online, understand why it's useful and then really think about what that lecturer said in that video about why it's important to visualize data and make it usable for the average person. So I'm going to stop there and go back to our slides here and I want to talk a little bit now about now that we have all of these resources you can get a sense of what we have available for you for your teaching. What can you do with them in an online environment particularly if you're not used to teaching online? So everyone's context is going to be a little bit different. Your resources, your tools that are available to you are going to be a little bit different depending on your university or what programs your university subscribes to. So we just had a couple of ideas here to get you started and then you can build off of that in a way that works best for you and your students. I think the simplest way to start is just to have your students watch a video, go into the library, explore videos that you think might be relevant to your content, the content that you're teaching, and then if you're using something like a learning management system, something like Moodle or Blackboard, maybe put the video in there and assign it to your students kind of like a pre-course reading and then use that to spur some sort of discussion so you can you can have a discussion in a message board if you have sort of an asynchronous lesson going on or if you have a small classroom and you're doing video conferencing or phone-based conferencing, you can use the video to spur an actual in-person or almost in-person discussion. You can also look to use the videos to introduce sort of a general topic that is relevant to whatever you're intending to teach that week and then you in your lesson that you prepare respond to the videos so have your students watch it so they're all on the same page and then maybe delve deeper into something that's covered in the video but not covered as deeply as you'd like or you can use it to spur a debate or you can use it to present alternative perspectives to the one that the lecturer has presented because obviously like any other teacher our lecturers are coming with their own expertise and their own perspectives based on whether they're an academic or whether they work for a particular NGO or organization. When it comes to using the mooks themselves on edX we certainly recommend that you enroll yourself in whatever course you think is relevant to your teaching and by doing that you can explore everything that I just showed you in an edX course. You can take a look to see if there are any quiz questions you'd like to borrow. Unfortunately you can't download those from edX but you can copy and paste the content into a format that works for you. You can take a look and see if the course includes interactive activities like the one that I showed you with the GapMinder website in our course and you can borrow those link out to any of the resources that you find. You can download any of the readings that you find in our courses and share those with your students. You can see what discussion prompts that we have available and you can borrow those to put in your own message boards on your own platforms so you can just dig around in the courses as we have them to see if there's anything that you'd like to use in your own course. And then finally one option that may work for some of you is you can have your students enroll directly in one of our courses. They can and you can tell them to you know complete the whole thing if that's something that works for you. You can ask them to just complete certain modules based on based on what is relevant to your lesson. The vast majority of the courses you're going to find on our edX page are what's called self-paced which means that they are open and available right now until the majority of them close in September and then they will be reopening again and they'll be available for a full year so there's no timeline there's no sense that the course is going to close anytime soon so you can enroll students in them and then they can follow along at their own pace or whatever pace you set for them so that they can view all of the content the videos the readings and participate in this global discussion that's going on on the message board with students from around the world. So I think now is a good chance to stop take a breath and give you all a chance to ask any questions that you have we're happy to go over anything that we've discussed if there's anything we can clarify for you that would be this would be a great time to do that as well. Meredith do you want to help us answer some questions? Absolutely and we've had a few come through as you've been talking Shannon so I'll go through those now but since this does seem to be a bit of a smaller group if you would like to raise your hand using that feature we can also call on you for a specific question there. So one question that came up rather early in the conversation was from Joan asking about signing in to use the video resources and things like that. Can you just clarify specifically what would require a login Shannon and what's just available through the library platform and through the x platform explicitly. So for the library if you want to view share or download any of those videos you should be able to do that without logging in the login feature is something that we use for a particular partnership program which I'm sure Florencia will discuss in a minute but if you're just interested in looking for some resources and and want to explore you do not need to log in to do that you should be able to access everything on the library without logging in for edX that is edX is its own company in its own platform and they do require you to register if you want to enroll in any of the courses but it's it's free I should also mention when you enroll in the course you'll see two options one's called the audit track and one is called the verified certificate track. edX does not give free certificates if you if you complete its courses they do something called a verified certificate and they do charge a fee for that so if you just want your students to experience the course tell them to enroll on the audit track and that is that is free if you or or any of your colleagues or students are interested in pursuing a certificate then by all means enroll in the verified certificate track and if if the cost of the if the fee is a concern edX offers its own financial aid so that's something you can look into as well if that's of use to you. There's one question that came through just shortly here about you did say early level masters correct. We did like I said that is sort of what we advertise it as that's going through a broad overview of these kind of complex global issues and global topics but I think like I said earlier you know your students best I think this the content is reasonable for undergraduate students and maybe if you're teaching an AP or an advanced high school students and you really want to spend a whole lesson dissecting what this person said in this video and going really deep into some of these these topics I think that it's really up to you how you want to use them and how you want to present them to your students but I encourage you to go take a look watch some of the videos and especially anything that is considered an introductory video might be a good place to start if you are teaching younger students and really as you take the resources for yourself and make them into your localized context you can change them to have discussion questions or reflection questions or assessment questions that are reflective of your your culture your regional geography your students age range things like that depending on how detailed you'd like to get so there are a number of ways that these can be translated another question that just came through and Shannon I think you'll be well versed in this it's from Joshua who says loha he is teacher on global issues courses as they're one course that covers each of the 17 global goals and offers the best readings on every different call. Aloha yes excellent question so if you are interested in teaching about the sustainable development agenda and the SDGs specifically obviously each of our courses is tied to an SDG that's what we're here for and that's that's the subject that we cover but if you're interested in sort of just what are the SDGs and what subjects and what issues do they cover we have a couple different courses our flagship course is a very first course we ever created it's called the age of sustainable development led by Columbia professor and and very renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs he's actually the director of the sustainable development solutions network our parent organization and he is featured or leads many of our courses so his his first course with us and our first course ever was this very comprehensive course called age of sustainable development and that's available on edX as a course and then all of the videos are available in the library we also have a newer course called how to achieve the SDGs that's also by Jeffrey Sachs and that is more action focused it's okay now that you know a little bit more about what the SDGs are what needs to be done to achieve them in different sectors of society what role does government play what role does civil society play what can the private sector do what can individuals do so that that's a more action oriented course rather than a sort of general overview and then if you don't want to take a full length you know eight to 14 week course we have something called transforming our world and that is what we call a mini course it's only five videos not not five mom just like five videos and also has readings and quiz questions but that's a really quick way to get a snapshot of what are the SDGs and why are they important so those are the three I would recommend if you're if you're interested in just a big overview of what the SDGs actually are there's a there's a few more questions about access coming in Shannon so the first if a faculty wants to use just one small video on the course it's possible right you can just take that video away from the library yeah that would be my recommendation is to if there's a video and like I said you can go into that handout that is attached to your control panel here and get a sense of what excuse me what topics are are covered in each course what are the titles of each of the chapters within a course and then you can find that video in in the library that's the easiest place I think to find individual videos if you are in an edX course if you're if you're playing around in the edX platform each video is available for download from that platform as well so if you're looking through it and you say oh this is really interesting you can press download video and just get it straight from there excellent one more question coming through about MOOCs and the platform itself how many learners are allowed to register on each MOOC is there a limit that's a good question I think our most popular MOOC at the moment is a course on atmospheric and climate science with Michael Mann he's a expert climatologist from Penn State that course currently has over 13,000 people enrolled in it but that I mean I think some MOOCs on edX or Coursera or other leading online learning platforms have had you know hundreds of thousands of people at a time because it's a because it's an open platform for for the general public people enroll and then maybe never actually take the course or they enroll but they don't participate in the discussion boards or they're all sort of taking it at different times so it's it's a little less structured than than a classroom like you would do but if you do have your students enroll in the course then you can sort of set deadlines for them and and sort of control their engagement in a little bit more of a controlled way but yeah I don't think that there's a limit as far as I know and Shannon can you say just a couple of words again about the languages which are available sure so every one of those key lecture videos anything that we consider a chapter will have at least an English language transcript so if if someone speaking you know we have faculty from all over the world so someone's accent may be difficult to to understand or if your students are not native English speakers themselves but they do understand English they may want to have the English subtitles there or to read the transcript rather than watch the video there are a number of other languages available but not every video has all the languages so I would recommend going to the library clicking that that little closed caption button and you can see whatever languages are available there I know we have a number of videos that have Spanish a couple of them have Portuguese I've seen French a couple of them have Mandarin it really depends on the volunteers in our network and who who's available to translate I think a number of them have Russian as well if that's interesting to you one question here and this might be an authority I want to jump on as well Carol asks how is new material or different topics commissioned hello Carol that's a great question as well so I would say that the majority of the MOOCs came together with a large and generous grant that we had from TIA Foundation time ago and these were mostly commissioned to different living experts around the world that put together an advisory group to identified faculty and we partnered with different organizations to ensure that that we got different voices so for instance I can give you an example of one MOOC that we're about to launch in a couple of weeks I hope on decent work so we partnered with the ILO and with different living experts around the world to ensure that we have diverse voices whether it's from a different perspective because these are academic MOOCs to also diversity in terms of as much as possible diversity in terms of regions of the world and gender etc so that's how it works at least the majority of our MOOCs later on we've been also starting to explore the opportunities of curating MOOCs that other have done and they can add value to our library our reporter but also partnering with some specific entities and seeking funding funding together to develop them Shannon and Meredith if you if I'm missing something please come in and do you have anything to add um no just that I think Florence had covered it that we work with different partners and different organizations to create content that we think is relevant to the discussion and and also relevant to their expertise so that's that's sort of where where the topics come from if you're interested in sort of why do we have the courses that we have yeah maybe one more thing to add and I know that there has been a lot of appetite for a business course that we don't have yet of course actually yesterday as we were running the other webinar like last night someone asked a question about business and we put Shannon put business in the library and many many videos up here because it's obviously some bit in our other online courses but something that we would like to do and we look for is perhaps to put together a MOOC on on business and on the SHS and particularly also how to teach at business schools so something to throw there because I know that there is some perhaps business school professor in the call yeah if I can jump on there Florentia that reminds me I did forget to mention one thing about the library that's that's relevant to that so I showed you all of the different categories that our courses are tagged by or connected to business is one that we want to add because we we do have content relevant to business management the corporate you know corporate philanthropy and business ethics and and the private sector in general and what their role is in this world it's not under our subject list but we will add it soon but anything that you want to look for that's not available under any of these categories you can just search by keyword so if you want to find something relevant to a particular region or particular country if there's a subject that isn't listed here like business so I can just do that right now I'll show you you can search there and it'll search through a couple of different things so it searches the title of the video it searches through the transcript to see if that keyword is mentioned and then in addition to being categorized all of our videos are tagged with with relevant tags of things that are important about that video so the search function also reviews the tag so if you're if you want a video about something happening in east Africa you could search for east Africa and it'll find you any videos that we have that are case studies on different things in the region or mention anything in the region so you have to go through and see what's relevant to you because it is searching through kind of every part of the video but that's a good way to find a subject that is not yet included in in this list up here wonderful um another couple of questions coming through just now does the edX platform comply with European data privacy rules which could be relevant for European students I can say from personal experience yes it definitely does we've had lectures in the past that have even tried to reach out to students in in more innovative ways and the platform does take all of these privacy considerations into their their own policies so while your students would register with a username and then they would receive kind of course updates through the edX platform either via email if they signed up for it that way or through course course updates and course announcements they are fully compliant with European data laws do you have anything to add on that Shannon? No I think you covered it um it's something that they paid a lot of attention to when when that was being discussed and when the laws went into effect so your your students should only receive emails relevant to the course and if they start receiving um and and perhaps marketing emails about courses that are relevant to their interests based on what they have signed up for already and I believe that you can unsubscribe from those types of emails in your user profile another question that just came through every video every part of is every video part of only one MOOC or is there some overlap so I from from what I've seen I believe that every video is associated with a singular MOOC there's not videos that are used again and again and again however there might be some themes that are similar so if there's something that you wanted to cover like when you looked up business and you could see all of the many different ways that business has been knitted throughout this fabric you can certainly use videos in a number of innovative ways but there wouldn't be a video that's used in lessons seven, eight and nine or in MOOCs three, four and five Shannon, do you have anything to add there? Yeah, agreed many of our videos are very similar particular if particularly if the courses have similar themes so like I mentioned earlier we have three courses that were developed with with Professor Jeffrey Sacks around the theme of sort of what are the sustainable development goals how can they be achieved so you may find multiple videos that are called something like an introduction to the SDGs or you know exploring SDG 12 or something if that's relevant to those discussions and they were filmed at different times for the particular MOOCs that they were part of but they may they may be a lot of there may be a lot of overlap in the content so that might just be a personal preference which one do you prefer listening to which one do you prefer looking at so there is a repetition of content there we have at the top of my head I think we have one course that was developed with some of our partners in the Mediterranean region that has a variety of it has its own videos and then it also does include some videos that the course is on food and agriculture specifically in the Mediterranean region and how that relates to sustainability in the region and so we work with them to create their own videos on regional issues and then I think they also borrow a couple videos from our course on feeding a hungry planet which is our global course on food and agriculture as well as our course One Planet One Ocean which is about oceans and ocean physics and ocean sustainability so that's sort of an anomaly but that particular course does have a couple of videos that have been borrowed from other courses but it also has its own videos that are specific to that course There is one more question Chen could you pull up the attachment the handout that's attached here do you still have that? Absolutely I do just a minute So there's one question here that asks if we could tell the route to find the courses that they would love to check them out for themselves and propose to teachers from Gina so I'd say the starting point for this discussion especially if you're going to be sharing with others in your network would be to pull up this handout and to look through it as you scroll down you'll be able to see each and every course listed out alphabetically these courses then have the faculty members listed on the left hand side if there's a particular leader that you're interested in learning from they also have the full syllabi so you can go on a week by week module by module basis and see thematically what you're interested in but then you can also mine down into each of the subjects that are available here so perhaps you you want to teach about sustainable development but you're not sure if you want to teach about financing if you want to teach about generally achieving if you want to teach about leadership you can go into several of the thematic modules and find the exact video that would suit your learners additionally because it's a PDF it's so easy to share and to use searchable content keywords to find your own your own resources there once you've found these courses that might be most relevant to yourself either going into the library and mining out those videos in particular now that you know what course they're associated with their title their lecture etc that would be one way to go or to enroll in the edX platform and find the full learning pathway there so that you can see any sorts of discussion questions that are going on Shannon, do you have anything to add? Yeah just that in this document here there are a couple things that are hyperlinked that if you want an easy way to get to just click on something and get to some of these resources that we've talked about on this first page here we're no it's not the first page on our second page here where we talk about content and resources this link here to edX.org where we describe the MOOCs as we describe them to you that should take you straight to our page on edX and similarly this paragraph here if you need to access the library this is already linked and you can just click that additionally each of the detailed look at each of the courses so we have this page here which is just a list of the titles of all of the courses that we have available but then if you go look at the details each title should be linked directly to the MOOC on edX so that's that's a really quick and easy way for you to just get from one place to the next just by using this one PDF I don't think there's any more questions I've seen a few hands go up and down over the course so if there are any hands that need to be raised maybe do so in the next five seconds otherwise we'll hand over to you Florencia perfect oh one more hand did to Homo just one second Shannon do you have the power to unmute it's Salomon yes just a minute who who am I looking for S-A-L-O-M-O-N yes let me unmute you here hi there can you hear us yes I can hear you oh we can hear you too great okay my name is Salomon from Great Lexa but I'm also based at the University of Rwanda I just want to ask a question about if S-D-G academic can provide support to individual universities like ours we really wish to start and encouraging our students to enroll to this mock and also to take you know use of these available courses but I think because we have not yet started using these online courses so I would like to know if S-D-G academy can provide the particular support to our university to be able to offer these courses to our students not necessary by asking our students to directly enroll to these courses through S-D-G academy but forever for I mean to make them available probably on our own website because they would like to probably intellect through themselves and also we also want to monitor them whether they are really taking these courses that's question number one number two which is read to this is about certification if like we have like a hundred or two thousand students because our university has about twenty six twenty six thousand students so probably we can take like one of course let's say introduction to sustainable development all of them they're supposed to take it if we do that and we want to give them a certificate as a university is there any problem with regard to this arrangement thank you Thank you very much I'm going to put you back on mute but thank you for your questions well I think I can answer the second one first because Florence is going to talk a little bit more about some of the ways that we connect with universities and partner with them to do just what you asked for to help them connect more with our content so I'll answer your second question first that it's really we the SDG academy ourselves we're not an accredited institution so we cannot offer any certification like I explained earlier edX does offer what it calls verified certificates and there is a fee associated with that and if that's an issue for anyone that they have a financial aid program so that's if you want to take the course on edX on your own and and do it to receive a certificate you click the verified track you pay the fee and if you pass the course you get the you get the certificate in terms of offering certification or academic credit through your own institution that is something that are the partners that we've worked at some some of the partner universities that we've worked with have done that but that's something that they usually have to discuss and work out with their own administration because every university or every you know ministry of higher education has different criteria for what they're allowed to give credit for so that's that's why we have this partnership program that Florence is going to describe in a minute so that we can help come up with different ideas for using our content in a way that they can then offer credit for the big thing is a I'd say like I said earlier our content or our assessments are not really geared towards a credit bearing course they're they're really there for public education so if you did want to find a way to offer our courses for credit at your institute at your institution I would recommend having supplementary assessments so take the course and then write an essay based on what you've learned in the course something like that because I think the the assessments that we have in our course are probably not sufficient to get credit at your institution but I think this is a great way to segue into Florence to talk a little bit more about how you can get involved with us if you if any of this is sounded interesting to you how you can learn more about us and our work and other ways to get involved with the academy thank you Shannon so much thank you Merida and everyone for your question so I really hope that the webinar has been enriching to you and that you will become more involved with us the academy and SESN generally so a couple of ideas and I'm happy to also take more questions by email and my colleagues as well so as a first step I would suggest if you can follow us on social media you will learn many more opportunities whether our webinars whether our new courses that we're launching events online events mostly now etc so please you know you have there our Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Instagram etc visit our website you can learn more about us then there you can subscribe to our mailing list and you receive our monthly newsletter by subscribe to subscribe you have to go to our website and on the bottom at the right side you will find like a bottom to subscribe you can also think if you are not part of SESN yet whether you can advocate in your own university to join and you will learn more about the many other opportunities in the wider SESN whether it's through the networks we have over 1100 members and each of the network have many interesting projects and activities that you can connect we have our mobilized our platform where people get together and learn how there's your learning and again many opportunities for you we have SESN youth that is advocating and bringing together youth to bring innovative solutions to the SES so there's also an interesting group with many volunteers and with a global school program and also in research and policy so there is a wide of different ways in which you can engage with SESN and we'll be happy to elaborate more at another opportunity obviously this webinar has been focused on the SESN academy but we are a very vibrant community and we would love that you're part of it finally and on this community particularly well I wanted to mention as Geno said over the last four years we run different cohorts of what we call the university partnership program which is basically we've been working with universities academy institutions and education programs to integrate SESN academy course material into whether it was new or existing programs around the world so the institutions that became UPP or our university partnership partners have received privileged access to our content and materials to ensure that and also the advice to ensure that they could run the programs and utilize sorry blended learning to deliver that experience in the classroom so by doing that they receive one-on-one consultation with our educational managers we also provided them with guidelines etc so this is one of the opportunities that you have to engage with us what I would like to mention is that we're in the process of rebumping this program to create a community of practice so what we mean is that over the years we've seen the benefit of our partners by engaging with us and having that experience that we believe that there's much more learning that can happen if we have a real community with us we appear sharing and learning so basically the thought behind this is we have valuable content right that you can engage but also you can create so we're thinking of how we can curate this material how you can share materials with others and ensure that that we all get benefits from dissemination of resources we wanted to create a community that is is community driven so the opportunity to collaborate and create have come with leading experts across the network and you will also receive this customized platform so the library that Shannon was showing and as I believe Joanne asked there is a logging on feature to it so basically people can get in create your own videos train your own playlists etc and we're also looking at this community of practice having the opportunity to have a role that is more a leader in this space and then we can all create resources together like secondary resources for instance and we can support each other so this is a very quick introduction of something that we're planning to launch in the next weeks so you will receive more information so I just finally want to say like I'd like to thank my team Marylith and Shannon for putting this webinar together and especially thank all of you for joining us and for your important work on sustainable development so we'll remain at your disposal please write to us let us know how your experience went and anything any other way that we can support you thank you so much yes thank you all for joining us today we've really appreciated it especially the positive comments that have come through our questions today if you do have any questions like like Florence yeah like Shannon have both said please do feel free to contact us follow us on social media the opportunities that we've listed here for future engagement there's something to know we really believe in these resources then we love the projects we've worked on them from from start to finish and we've seen how they can be implemented and we just know that there's such high quality material that is there and is available to you so we do believe in these and we want to see you succeed so while there are so many ways that we would love to work with you in the future what we would really like to see is for you to succeed through this digital transition so if there are questions that we can answer or if there's any way that we can help out please do let us know and otherwise we hope to see you in a webinar soon yeah and if you want to let us know how it's working out you can always tweet at us or follow tell us on social media or send us an email we'd love to hear how things go with with these resources in your classes and how your students like them we're always looking for feedback so thank you everyone come on bye


Please subscribe to this YouTube channel mentor talk can do press bell button for notifications. There is a famous idiom which says it is easier said than done. It doesn't mean that certain ideas are impossible to execute. It merely means that it is doable but it may not be so easy. The escalation of tension between India and China has raised concerns about continuance of India-China economic relations. It is not the case that we are nobody to each other. The current situation can seriously affect economic dimensions of both the nations. But I am making out a case here for cutting down all economic ties with China. Because overall according to me these in the past many years it has been seen that we have gained nothing out of China rather China has used us and gained a lot out of India. China is Asia's biggest economy. It is the second largest in the world based on GDP of about US dollar 14 trillion. Whereas India is at third position in Asia with about US dollar 3 trillion. There is quite a that is quite a gap. Today China is India's second major trading partner. First being the United States. If you go through the website of the Indian Bessie in China it proudly shares a solid economic bond between India and China. For the for the for the year 2018 bilateral trade between both the countries increased by more than 13% year on year to reach about US dollar 96 billion. With India's exports rallying to about just US dollar 19 billion dollars whereas India's imports from China have reached about US dollar 77 billion. There has been a huge trade deficit to the extent of US dollar 51 billion and more. And that has been a cause of concern for India for the reason that it indicates lack of ability to compete with Chinese manufactured goods. Our exports are much lower than Chinese imports. The growth in bilateral foreign direct investment has not maintained tempo with the increase in trading volumes between the two countries. The private investment from China into India is focused more on Indian startups in technology and e-commerce. Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Fosun, Baidu and Tencent have invested more than US dollar 5 billion in many Indian startups. Chinese large corporation Alibaba and its associates alone invested about US dollar 2 billion in Indian startups such as Paytm and BigBasket. But there are no reliable figures for investment from China into India because China has also been rooting its investment through third countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and many others especially in sectors such as startups etc which has since been restricted to some extent by the government of India since last year after bringing in necessary FDI regulations in that regard. In fact that policy of India or that policy action by India has also been condemned by China earlier last year. As per informal data more than 100 Chinese companies have established offices operations in India. Many large Chinese state-owned companies in the field of machinery and infrastructure construction have secured huge projects in India and have started project offices in India. These comprise of Sino Steel, Shaw Gang International, Baoshan Iron and Steel Ltd, Sani Heavy Industry Ltd, Shang Quing, Lafen Industry Ltd, China, Dongfang International, Sino Hydro Corporation. Many Chinese electronic IT and hardware manufacturing companies are also having operations in India. These include Huawei Technologies, ZTE, TCL, Hire etc. A large number of Chinese companies are involved in EPC projects in the power sector of India as well. These include Shanghai Electric, Harbin Electric, Dongfang Electric, Shang Yang Electric and many more. In recent years Chinese mobile companies have have accomplished extraordinary and significant growth in India. Xiaomi became largest mobile handset selling company in India. Today Chinese mobile handset companies Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo Realme occupy nearly 50% of Indian mobile handset market. How many large Indian corporations are there in China? I don't think more than one or two. This is a major imbalance between India and China in the economic context. China expects India to have liberal investment policies whereas investment into China is purely for its exports not for its domestic markets. You can go to China, you set up your manufacturing units and export wherever but it is not meant for domestic consumption. So, it may not be difficult for India to say bye-bye to Chinese companies and investors and India must say bye-bye to Chinese now.