So thank you very much. I wanted to tell you about work we have been doing that has now been extended into the area of transportation light wading using hybrid coatings. Now hybrid materials and the kind of hybrid material I'm talking about here are those that are formed with inorganic and organic components, essentially tailored at molecular lens scales. So we connect them and we can make a variety of multifunctional coatings that can have different properties ranging from high stiffness, high hardness, wear properties through high transparencies and even conducting properties as you'll see in the talk today. And they're used in a wide range of different technologies that could be used in anything from anti-reflection coating systems through to sensors, barrier films for photovoltaics. They're used in emerging stretchable and wearable electronic areas, touch display. And of course as I'll talk to you about today in the area of coating plastic substrates for transportation light wading. Another advantage of these materials is that they can be made potentially very cheaply. And particularly what I wanna focus on today is the use of atmospheric plasma deposition. So we create a plasma in California air at room temperature or at least low temperature and we can then deposit onto surfaces like plastics. So polymeric glazing and moldings are an extremely high want from the transportation community. There's a number of very real benefits here and of course you guys all know we already drive automobiles that have a large number of plastic components don't always survive very long. So the advantages here are lightweight. In the US alone on an annual basis if we were to replace just the glass glazing in cars you would save something like 195 million pounds. Worldwide that translates into something like 1.24 billion pounds. So that's a lot of mass that you wouldn't otherwise have to move around. But actually turns out that that's really only one of the benefits. Another benefit here is that you lower the center of mass of the vehicle. So from a crash worthiness point of view this actually presents a big advantage. There's a significant amount of part consolidation that you get by using plastic substrates and moldings. You can enable aerodynamic improvements in vehicles and of course we're seeing that in many lower cost vehicles now that are being produced. And maybe one of the most important reasons from a marketing point of view is actually improved aesthetics of vehicles. You can make really cool looking transportation vehicles when you have the ability to mold in a relatively inexpensive way with plastic moldings. So what's the problem? The problem is you can't put a plastic substrate out into the terrestrial environment and expect it to last very long. It simply doesn't, it needs protection and we're all familiar with this. This is a pervasive problem in any form of plastic coating that actually is used in terrestrial applications. In current coatings just don't meet performance standards. This is a real problem. Coding methods that are used to actually make coatings of course typically either use vacuum based systems where you can form some of the highest quality coatings but then of course all the parts have to be put into a vacuum chamber. You have to pump it down to do the deposition. So that actually puts lots of constraints on things like throughput and makes the coating process expensive. On the other hand there are various ways of using sol-gel chemistries to make coatings. The problems here are often related to solvents that basically come out of the processing methods and that presents other problems and environmental challenges. And in all of these cases as I've mentioned we really do need to improve properties significantly. So that's the focus of what we've been trying to do on this program that's been newly supported by GSEP and involves thinking about ways of making much better protective systems, coating systems for plastic substrates. And let me acknowledge my students as you see over here in postdoc who have actually done all of the work that I'll show you today. So a couple of little sections that I wanted to go through in this talk. The first is since we really care about making durable systems I wanted to say just a little bit about what it is you need to know about a coating system that really is a key metric for its reliability. Then I'll turn to a section dealing with coatings that we're actually making and show you what I think are some very real successes in building some really impressive coating systems that have much better properties than even the best current commercial systems. And then show you how these methods can be extended to make things like other functional coatings involving for example anti-reflection coating systems and transparent and conducting films. So with respect to lifetimes from a thermomechanical point of view one of the most important aspects for long-term reliability and durability of a coating system is of course how well it adheres to the substrate. And over many years now and I'll show you some compendium of data here we have developed methods to measure adhesion in thin film systems where we can do this very accurately and very reproducibly to obtain either the adhesion of the interface or the cohesion of the layer. So this is gonna feature in this talk because it's one of the most fundamental metrics of long-term durability. Now though, let me also mention though that even if you've not exceeded the driving forces for, let me see if I can get this cursor to work here for, no I'm not able, oh there it is there. So this is the driving force here G that comes from the sort of stresses that might be present in a coating or the handling or packaging or whatever it is. When that exceeds the cohesion energy then of course the system will fail. But it turns out that if G is less than the adhesion energy then in the presence of environmental species or incoming photons from the environment or the sun or with increasing temperature then coatings might cohesively crack and debond from the substrate. And I'm showing a picture here of an actual commercial coating that was used on an aerospace commercial window application. So when you next fly on a plane if you look out of the window sometimes you'll see that sort of slightly crazed appearance and what this is in fact is exactly what you're seeing here. It's the most typical degradation process that happens to protective coating systems. So one measure of making a better coating is actually to be able to characterize these adhesive properties and also to characterize the kinetics of how fast they come apart. And so this is something we do in all of the work we do whether it's related to solar technologies or micro-electronic device technologies going through to coating systems as I'm talking about here. And I wanted to show this data here which represents the adhesion. These were the first measures of adhesion of commercial coating systems that are used on commercial aircraft. They had been used for literally years in some case decades. Some of them were known to perform better. Some of them were known not to perform as well but there was no metric by which this had been measured and characterized. So we were really able to do this for the first time and this is some of the original data that I'm showing here. There's some other interesting kinetic phenomenon that happens when you actually irradiate the specimen in situ with UV light as you can see here. The little sample is sitting down over there and here we can measure the rate at which these interfaces are debonding. And the important point here is that you can see this is just the mechanical loads on the bottom. This is the rate on the vertical axis but you can see that it's not just mechanical loads that are important. It's incoming photons that are destabilizing basically being absorbed and cleaving bonds that give rise to an acceleration in the debond process. So these are the things we've characterized and I promised you a compendium of data. This is a slide that I like to show that shows the range of adhesion values for a wide range of different materials and coatings, everything from microelectronics to organic photovoltaics to the recent perovskite systems. You can see wide ranges in properties here. Clearly higher numbers here indicate better performance. And so the coding systems we're looking at here are started around about 10 and increase. So that's a little calibration. Let me tell you now about some of the coatings that we're making for plastic substrates. So we create plasmas with two different methods. One is with a capacitively coupled plasma system shown in the middle. This typically uses either helium or nitrogen gas. It's a low temperature plasma. Or on the right hand side is a dielectric barrier, a breakdown system where we can create slightly higher temperature plasmas. The advantages here is that we can do it with just normal compressed air. Obviously using helium in the capacitively coupled system is not really conducive to industrial scale manufacturing. Now these plasmas, by the way, are ubiquitous. Practically every large company that applies protective coatings has them. They mostly use for preparing the surface, functionalizing the surface cleaning it rather than doing the deposition. So some of the innovation we've been able to make here is to actually use ways of delivering the precursors of coatings that we wanna build into these plasmas and then depositing them on the substrate. Now this is a plasma assisted process. We use precursors of various types. We've typically only used very simple inexpensive precursors so that we can make this a scalable manufacturing low cost process. And there are complex reactions that happen as these precursors decompose and then basically a film is grown, a coating is grown on the substrate. And we monitor these processes with various methods, including optical spectroscopies and in situ mass spectroscopy to figure out what the mechanisms are and what the decomposition processes of the precursors are. So let me show you some of the sort of higher level results here. The first is to show you the kind of highly transparent coatings that we can make. Now these coatings, and you can see one over here towards the bottom are essentially a hundred percent transparent in the visible. You simply cannot measure that those coatings are present. This is a coating on a polycarbonate substrate here. And then above that are two of the core properties that we would measure. One is the stiffness of the coating in the form of the elastic modulus. And the other is the adhesion energy, which I've already mentioned. Now I've circled two of the coatings that we've made here. They're made with the same precursor. We just simply adjust the plasma conditions. And in one case you can see we can make a very stiff coating. This coating has a stiffness that's very high. The star that you see here is the best current commercial Solgel coating. So this is what's typically used for aerospace window applications. And you can see that the coatings that we can make are actually much stiffer. Now stiffer coatings mean better wear properties, wear and abrasion properties. And that's again one of the most important things that you look for in a protective coating. So we can make stiffer coatings. You can't do this with Solgel processes because you can't use high enough annealing temperatures to actually develop the highly connected molecular network that would give you these stiffnesses. On the other hand, we can also buy, and these are the same two coating systems here shown on the other side. We can make them very adhesive. So the stiffer coating here, the essentially a dense silica coating made with atmospheric plasma essentially has the same adhesion value as a good commercial coating. But the other coating that's slightly less stiff, we actually incorporate little carbon bridges into these coatings. And we can make them adhere very well to the substrate. So we can get a combination here in these two different coatings of either high stiffness, which means high wear, abrasion properties, or high adhesion, which also translates into longer term durability. So the key then was to see whether we could do these things together.  We used the adhesive coating on the bottom, the stiff coating on the top that's shown over here. And you can see that we can achieve this bilayer coating over here which in terms of both stiffness and adhesion has far superior properties to the very best commercial coating that's currently available. So this has caused a lot of interest. We have a number of companies that are now thinking about using these types of systems we're actually engaged with several of them are doing real industry like abrasion and durability tests to assess the efficacy of these coatings. Those coatings were made with just one precursor. We can make these coatings with several different types of precursors. We can grow them very quickly. And you can see here again is another set of data showing another bilayer coating. This one is actually made much more quickly with even cheaper precursors and again has this great combination of properties. But wait, there's more. We also in my group do spray deposition for various different material systems. And just very recently as part of our GSEP program we've started looking at combining spray coating which of course is something that the industry is very familiar with with atmospheric plasma deposition.  Now I mentioned that this is a capability in my group. We have a significant sol-gel capability. We make lots of different coatings. This is one hybrid coating that's made with an epoxy-functionalized silane and a zirconium alkoxide precursor. There's advantages of using this zirconium alkoxide. We can form very moisture resistant coatings. And so in this work what we've done is to actually do what I just said which is to make now a bilayer coating with initially spray and then atmospheric plasma. And here we have achieved the highest adhesion values we have ever seen for a coating system. You can see here adhesion values for this bilayer spray atmospheric plasma coating that are in access of 60 joules per meter squared. And in fact the failure here cannot happen at the interface. It happens in the bulk substrate. So we've made the interface and the coating so resistant to failure that it now fails in the substrate. And that of course is the measure of the best possible protective coating. So we're very excited about this strategy. This allows us to do it really quickly. Not a long process. We can actually combine the spray head with the plasma head and move the two on a gantry together. Could be moved over curved surfaces. So there's a lot of potential here for this method. Let me just spend the last couple of minutes talking about two other areas where we can use atmospheric plasma. One is in the production of anti-reflection coating systems. Again, there are advantages here because we can do this quickly. We can do it at low temperature. We can do it on plastics. We can do it on other devices, device materials. And clearly there's many applications where sensors are used or where glazings are used where anti-reflection properties are important. Our early work has looked just at single layer coatings and you can see here the simulation showing the effect of a single layer coating on reducing the reflection from a device surface. In this case, this is a silicon device. Obviously if you use multi-layer coatings you can get better anti-reflection properties. And again, we've done this in air. So no vacuum equipment here, no solution chemistry. This is just in air. And you can see here with either tantalum or titanium coatings the very significant improvement we get in anti-reflection properties, just with a single layer. So our work here now is looking at extending this to multi-layers where we expect that we can achieve even better anti-reflection coatings properties. And then finally, I'll make mention of some work we've done in transparent conducting films. Of course, many of you will know there's a lot of interest in replacing some of the more expensive transparent conducting materials like indium tin oxide and zinc oxide of course is potentially a very inexpensive alternative. The problem is that most zinc oxides have been made with vacuum-based systems and techniques. That's a very good quality films, high transparencies, good conductivities but you need expensive processing. So we've attempted to do this again just with atmospheric plasma in normal air environments. And this has been successful. Despite the fact that many people that are involved with much more sophisticated CBD processes told us that it would never work but in fact, unencumbered by that kind of knowledge we went out and did it anyway. And you can see here very successful coating here of several different polymers. We've coated PMMAs, polycarbonates, PET. We have a good adhesive film. We can get transparencies of up to 98%. And when you look at the all important resistivity you can see here values as low as 100 ohm centimeters were achieved again in air. No annealing, no doping, simply deposited at low temperatures on plastics. So again, we're excited about this. We haven't even really started to look in detail at what we could achieve with doping and we can easily dope in these processes hopefully to get even better conductivities in these materials. And you can do the same thing with tie nitride, tie oxide, hybrid blends. And again here we can achieve resistivities on the order of 100 ohm centimeters. So we think there's a lot of possibilities for atmospheric plasma deposition. It's like a toaster. Most companies have them. Nobody's just really thought of taking this additional step injecting precursors into these systems and being able to fabricate everything from really protective high quality coding systems through to other functional coatings that could be used for sensor and other technologies that include everything from display through solar. So thank you for your attention. Time for questions. The application to GSEP would tend to be, I would think in making lightweight moldings and then put these coatings on them so that they're strong enough and last long enough. So the breakthrough that affects decarbonization is in lightweight vehicles, is that right? That's correct. Well, in transportation systems in general, I mean the focus, the sexy pictures that I show are of these cool cars but there's application in lightweight trucks. Ford is actually about to announce a truck that will have all polymer glazing. So there's applications in areas like that or in other transportation systems. Anywhere where you're moving large masses and there would be an advantage of using plastic substrates as opposed to the much more heavier substrates that would typically be used. Your high adhesive coatings, what happens to them when you're recycling and what happens to those chemicals when they are maybe evaporated by heat and go into the environment? Yeah, good question. And the basic components of our coatings, particularly those hybrid coatings are they're essentially organosilicate materials. So we don't really have anything other than carbon, silicon and oxygen in those coatings. And so there's no particularly environmentally dangerous atoms present in those particular coatings. So they're designed not to decompose, obviously as a protective coating, you'd like it not to undergo any easy decomposition process. But basically, if you were to heat them up to higher temperatures in the presence of oxidizing environment, they would basically decompose into silicon, oxygen and carbon. So is it correct that the biggest failure mode you're worrying about for the automotive glazings is UV light accelerating the crazing? And if that's right, what materials, what coatings could you put on there that would block the UV light to protect the plastic? Yeah, Mike, that's a great question. It turns out, well, UV light is not the only thing we're concerned about. You primarily have to initially start worrying about things like wear and abrasion resistance. So you want high stiffness coatings. You need them to be adhesive because otherwise they don't stay on. But you're right, and as I showed, UV light actually accelerates the debonding processes, the cohesive cracking, and there's even some other bulk properties, changes in the films that can happen. So in addition to the coatings as I've described them, you also need a UV protection package. And I didn't show any of the results that we have, but Shingming, who's actually sitting right over there, has been looking at incorporating UV absorbing molecules during the atmospheric plasma deposition, and he's actually succeeded. So we can actually deposit the underlying layer with a UV absorbing molecule that will actually shield the underlying polymer from UV light because in fact, you're less concerned about the coatings in terms of UV degradation. It's more the underlying substrate that needs to be protected. So including UV absorbing molecules is something that we're doing. Including nanoparticles is the other strategy. And we haven't started that work yet, but as part of what we want to do in the GSEP effort is actually to include nanoparticles during deposition. These are the typical UV absorbing nanoparticles that would provide that kind of protection, but it's important to include that as well. Okay, thank you very much for a great presentation. Sure.


This paper proposes a computationally efficient deep learning architecture for satellite classification of complex environments using convolutional neural networks, CNNs, which outperforms other well-known CNNs and machine learning algorithms in terms of mean overall accuracy, significantly improving the accuracy of wetland classes. This article was authored by Ali Jamali, Massoud Madyampri, Brian Briscoe, and others.


Welcome all to the dynamic coalition webinar on sustainability models of OER. Thank you all for being here. I'm giving the floor to my colleague Aishatu for a very brief presentation of the OER recommendation and then we will continue with our distinguished speakers. Please Aishatu, the floor is for you. Thank you Eleni for giving me the floor. I will make a short presentation about the UNESCO OER recommendation. I will do my presentation in French. So I shall briefly go over UNESCO's recommendation on OER but let us first see what a recommendation is. A recommendation is one of the main standard setting instruments of UNESCO. It is the instrument through which UNESCO is going to indicate a set of standards to member states and then those member states are to report periodically on the principles and standards in the recommendation. The recommendation, this one in particular, will be relatively flexible and will be able to adapt to constant technological progress. UNESCO does not have hundreds of recommendations. There are dozens of UNESCO recommendations just to give you an idea. From 1956 to today the organization has adopted only 35 recommendations and since the year 2000 there have been seven. So let's look at things more closely regarding OER. Recommendation was adopted in 2019 giving definitions of OER and definitions of open licenses since open licenses are contained in the definition of OER. So these OERs are materials for learning teaching research in the public domain or protected by copyright and published under open license authorizing consultation reuse and repurpose and adaptation and redistribution free of charge for others. An open license is a license which respects intellectual property rights of the holder but also gives the public the right to consult, reuse or repurpose the material and to adapt educational material. The recommendation also gives a list of stakeholders and it also clearly defines objectives. So the objectives there are five of these. First of all the capacity building for creation, access, use, adaptation and redistribution of OER. The second objective is to develop support policies and then the third is to guarantee inclusive and equitable access and the fourth which will be of particular interest today is to develop sustainability models. There's a fifth objective regarding facilitation of international cooperation. In 2020 there was the dynamic coalition which was set up in order to support the implementation of the UNESCO recommendation and also to enhance the sharing and to create synergies around the recommendation. So the areas of action of the recommendation that is what you see on this next slide. So if you look at number four which is in a way central to this webinar let us focus on this. So this is quite close to the five objectives I was mentioning earlier and here you have number four to develop sustainability models. So key messages were drafted which are measures and actions to be taken by member states or which can serve as inspiration for them regarding first sustainability models for OER. Here we have revised policies and regulations in terms of procurement, a widening simplification of the procurement of goods and services, creation, property, translation, adaptation, preservation, archiving etc. And then we have the strengthening and capacity building. Then the catalyst for sustainability models so through financing, traditional financing and non-traditional mechanisms to mobilize resources for the acquisition of OER. It also refers to the promotion and raising of institutions in countries of other models of creation added value through OER, stressing participation. Also a call for innovation and common courses also support to linguistic translation of open licenses and the creation of mechanisms for the implementation and the use of OER and optimization of budgets and existing funds. So this covers a lot, quite a few actions and measures which have to be implemented by the member states. But we only have an hour so we won't be able to go into every detail but through the presentations that are going to begin we'll be focusing on the most important points in order to give some idea of the sustainability mechanisms, funding and also the sustainability models for OER in higher education. So now I should like to turn to our distinguished panelists so we shall give the floor to our first speaker, Mr. Amil. It's a pleasure to be here, thank you for the invitation to my colleagues at UNESCO and for spearheading this important initiative in the dynamic coalition and trying to get us moving forward with the very valuable goals of the UNESCO recommendation from 2019. I have a short presentation about 10 minutes to get the ground, set the ground and the discussion a bit on economic models and sustainability factors for OER. I basically divided this into two, I think which are two fairly common ways of setting up this discussion around sustainability when we're talking particularly about economic models for OER. The first one is a commercial and if we could move to that slide please. It is a commercial aspect of OER and what I tried to do is to use, I think we have had a few publications that have dealt specifically with the idea of looking at these factors, these possibilities of engaging in sustainable economic models for OER over the years and I think we've had some convergence over time into what kind of commercial models have been tried, experimented with and which ones have been successful in maintaining a lot of initiatives. I'll go very quickly through these and I've indicated a number of examples on the right and these slides will be available later for those that can't find these initiatives just by searching but I just wanted to give you a sense of some of the initiatives that actually exist that have been using these models and so if you look at the creator pays model which is the idea that whoever is furnishing the either the book or the music or whatever it may be will pay to make this resource available. You can look at a music example from Jamendo which is a music platform that's been fairly successful where the creator pays to have their content there or a portion of their profits to the platform to have them available but you can look and I just chose two initiatives. You can look at publishers, book publishers that have been doing this very successfully for a very long time. These are two small publishers from Brazil, Filos and Pimenta but I just wanted to give you a sense you know African Mines is another one that comes to mind. There are a bunch of other initiatives that have been working like this for a very long time and in this in this model the creator will pay whatever fee is necessary to make the product become available and it can be available with an open license. There's a very strong model around commercial use and I think one of the most successful ones that I that I think people don't really quite know about is film music.io. A lot of their resources are available as YouTube tracks and the way film music.io works is that they license their tracks which are really great quality. License them openly with a cc by license but if you're going to make commercial use of them or if you want to donate you can do so and it's been very sustainable. You can pay for extra features and I just decided to use an example of a software here but it's a software that we use in education quite a bit. The productivity software like Holy Office which is a substitute for an improvement to other initiatives like the office suits that you might be regularly using and depending on whether you pay for for for a monthly fee or an installment or a user per head you know per user you will get extra features and so the base of the software is open it has some limitations if you pay you get a little bit more but the base of the software the code itself is free the the system itself is free and open. You can get commercial models that are based on customization this is a model that's incredibly successfully used and free and an open software and it happens in an editorial in publications as well so you might get a base text or book or a course and you can have people pay for customization so whether it's just to put the logo of the institution or a school or a university but they might pay also to have certain features that they need or plugins that must be installed or content that needs to be translated and that's a very successful model that's been around for a very long time. You can also pay for extra services and that has been consolidated as a model for OER big OER platform so Lumen and Coursera are good examples of this where a lot of content in the case of Lumen I believe all content but Coursera some content is available openly and you can pay either for data analytics or you can pay for a certification and that that model has been also around for quite a long time. Finally advertising is one there is there's a lot of I think people are put off by the idea of advertising and educational content as they should be and so I don't have a very good example but I decided to stretch it a little bit and look at what OpenSpotify does because Spotify is a platform for content and if you look at podcasts that are streamed through Spotify a lot of them or a few of them have open licenses and so OpenSpotify supports itself in partially through advertising you can qualify that some of these some of this content that's available openly elsewhere is distributed through OpenSpotify with an open license and is generating revenue through advertising. It is a model that I think in our next talk we're going to have some ideas of this but I think it's a model that people are generally not fond of for good reasons. Finally direct sale is a model that many publishers started working in the beginning and it was unsuccessful for many of them but I decided to pick one example of an author who's from Spain and she has an incredible manifesto around publishing openly and she publishes her books which are incredibly high quality and available all over the world that have been translated in many places. The books are available with an open license and you pay for the print version which is a model that has shown to be unsuccessful to many large publishers but sustains itself through small publications this is just one example there are many others. So this is just a general overview of what the generally commercial space has been done to provide some financial sustainability for these services. If we can move on we can just move two slides over we'll talk a bit about what I'm calling here reciprocity models and reciprocity models are a bit different and that's a generic word for a lot of the things that are going to be here but we find a lot of other ways to sustain repositories which are not necessarily based on on advertising or commercial use and one of them is obviously subscription I mean paying a monthly fee for something so you know flat world knowledge moved in that direction from a previous model if you look at LeMonde and LeMonde diplomatique here in Brazil and in other places you you have a newspaper that's licensed openly but you pay for it through subscription you support it through subscription and the user base then you know the large user base sustains the publication but it's available to everyone so there's a model here where it's not necessarily getting the largest amount of people to subscribe or to pay and only they get the benefit but the sustainable base of continuous subscription of paying users that will allow the the publication or the content to be available to other people there's obviously the donation model and you can look at a number of successful platforms that have sustained themselves through large donations both from foundations and government but also small donations they're open to get small donations and open stacks and is a good example on FET which has I call it FET it's in English it's P-H-P-T but we it has a very long track record of providing quality content openly for physics math and so forth online a crowdfunding has has been a really great example for for small publications and educational material as well you know for production of videos of educational content documentaries Catarzy is a platform for for crowdfunding in brazil but there are many others around the world every country has a bunch of them that are out allowing for crowdfunding we've had very successful examples of people willing to fund educational content children's books platforms documentaries through crowdfunding and it's a it's a when you when you found that kind of niche it's very easy to keep it going another one is crowd sourcing is this idea more aligned with with free and open software where you get people to contribute so again I use only offices as an example but it could really apply to almost any free and open source initiative is this idea that you get people to contribute and participate in the process of creating content and joining you know there are other examples in the OER landscape as well finally one that we don't really talk about much because it seems self-sustainable but it isn't it's public funding you know we have we have done surveys from countries in South America Latin America and we know that public initiatives die very often I mean they don't sustain themselves very often but it's it's a when they do last it's it's a very viable funding method for large very large nationwide or regional repositories and so we've had some successful initiatives around the world and keeping the public repositories open and available they mutate and they change but public funding continues to be at least in our region of the world a major source of of availability of content and repositories finally partnerships establishing partnerships with existing players and creating a consortium is a really good way to do this so the archive dot org does this with you know libraries and people that have content that they want to share online european is a great consortium example and finally working through recognition it doesn't seem like it's an economic model but putting your content for online in some examples you can look at it as working through to get you know a public display or participation in a community or to just get recognition for the work that you do these are important I think they're important ways to look at the more economic side of this and just very quickly to finish I'd just like to just bring on the next slide some other considerations that we've we've been unearthing here doing some literature reviews on sustainability trying to get a sense of what other factors are involved beyond the idea of just financial sustainability and if you can move to the next slide that I appreciate it so we know that you know financing and whatever in arrangement we come up with is incredibly important to keep particularly repositories open but even the creation and the sharing of OER but there there are a number of other factors that are that I just wanted to share with you first to think together is this idea that you know particularly repositories and places that people should visit should have this idea of collective values of promoting the values of openness provide some support for people to produce and share and many repositories and sites do this so OER Commons for example does this very well open stacks does it as well incentives for engagement are particularly important we know this from any scenario that we work on OER incentives are incredibly important to sustain and to have always have content for people to produce content quality criteria are important not only for OER but for any content and so having clear evaluation criteria and mechanisms that's always been an important thing so people will look at the repository of the content expecting it to be high quality and we'll come back for it and we'll contribute to it a focus on openness and OER we have a lot of hybrid solutions we have a lot of repositories and services that are not uniquely open and so going back to the idea of values when people people are more likely I think to contribute to something that's very open in principle rather than something that's hybrid that mixes content that's open and is not providing mechanisms for auto-organization a community to build you know people to manage themselves in a community is an important feature having a clear policy and this has a connection with everything else we've mentioned before I mean making sure that people know what exactly this service is supposed to do and whether it really ascribes the principles of openness investing in OER development which we know is incredibly difficult to do but investing and not only just providing the service or having a repository to provide this content but investing in production is incredibly important and finally having some sort of support for teacher professional development uptake you can provide the best content possible but nobody will use it if they don't really know how to if you don't have opportunities for people to learn how to use it there are many more these are just some that have come up in recent literature reviews that we've done and I just wanted to put those out there as a way to dialogue beyond the idea of just financial sustainability so this was meant as a brief sort of introduction you know spreading out all of these ideas so that we can continue the discussion thank you very much again for the opportunity and I look forward to the continuing conversation thank you very much for this excellent presentation we are now moving to our next speaker who is Mr. Ahmed Tilly welcome to you Mr. Tilly is co-director of the OER lab at the Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University and he will speak about insight and evolution of OER sustainability models based on on the result on offer study over to you thank you so much for the invitation good morning good afternoon and good evening everyone so today we will be talking about a very important topic that has been highlighted by UNESCO in their recommendation in 2019 which is about sustainability models so actually our presentation will be a continuity of Dr. Amir our colleague has presented which is about the type of financial models that has been reported and in this context we will be talking about insights from both the literature and the experts so we will start by the basic definition of OER I think everyone is familiar with which is OER our learning teaching and research materials which has been or which have been published in the public domain under an open license and here I would like to clarify one misunderstanding of OER which is is not like free pizza what do we mean by that means like people think that if something is free they can use it the way they want but actually it's not how OER works so basically for OER we need to respect the open license under which an OER is presented so that's why taking into consideration the open license is very important when we are talking about open educational resources and especially for sustainability models what's the challenge of OER as we all know that OER like we said is free is free of charge however for universities or for schools when they provide OER they need to pay for too many things including for instance infrastructures designers teachers etc so the question is how can they earn money if they need to provide OER for free so this is like one of the challenges that has been reported with OER we can like take one one example which is about John Mitchell so John Mitchell is the overseas Stanford universities and he mentioned due to the sustainability of open courses and OER Stanford may turn away from offering free online courses and here we can see the importance of coming up with sustainability solutions and financial solutions which could help providers to earn money but at the same time respect the definition of OER and providing resources for free as we all know UNESCO at the end of 2019 has published the OER recommendations which focuses on five areas or like five objectives and one of these objectives is OER sustainability and one of the sub-objectives is as you can see the first one is about reviewing current provisions for current policies and regulations to expand and simplify the process of creating OER etc so this is for the first sub-goal which is related to OER sustainability so the second one is about catalyzing sustainability models not only through traditional funding sources but also through non-traditional sources by mobilizing like different partnership networking etc so in this context and in line with UNESCO recommendations and to fulfill at least those two sub-goals we have focused on developing this study so this study focuses on the use of triangulation method what do we mean by the triangulation method the triangulation method means using different sources to collect one specific information about a particular area and of course in this study we will be focusing about sustainability models so first in line with UNESCO sustainability sub-goal one which is about reviewing like sustainability models and policies etc we have conducted a systematic literature review and we will see we have obtained eight OER sustainability models then in order to catalyze sustainability models what do we mean by this means we all know that technology has created new opportunities for different sustainability models maybe they were not they did not exist let's say 10 years ago or long ago so in this way in order to further catalyze OER sustainability models we have also involved experts and we have used the DeFi method in order to validate the sustainability models the first process about the systematic review we have our research questions to answers so these research questions are mainly in line with UNESCO goals and sub-goals about what are the sustainability models that have been presented in the research related to OER and then we will be using different search keywords and databases third we will be using inclusion and exclusion criteria and at the end we will talk about paper quality to search for different sustainability models in the literature first we have used different keywords such as open education open educational resources open educational practices open license open access so here we have used different synonyms for open education or OER and then for models we have also used different synonyms such as sustainability models funding models business model financial models so we have combined those terms in order to conduct a systematic and a comprehensive review and identify as much OER sustainability models as possible and we have used different databases such as Science Direct Taylor and Francis IEEE etc then so we have used these keywords and we have obtained a lot of studies then to filter these studies we have used what we call inclusion and exclusion criteria for instance we have mainly focused on papers in English we have focused on papers which gave enough details about OER sustainability models and one of the things that that we would like sorry for that that we would like to point out for it is the exclusion of MOOCs so as you can see in the exclusion criteria we have excluded MOOCs why you have excluded MOOCs because now at least there are a lot of tension in the literature related to MOOCs are they OER or not are they in line with the definition of OER or not this is one two for MOOCs they have different sustainability models which could be similar or also quite different than OER sustainability models so in order to stay out of this type of confusion so we have excluded any sustainability models which which have been talking about MOOCs and at the end we obtained so this thematic review we have obtained eight OER sustainability models so the first one is institutional model the second one is governmental model endowment model membership model donation model freemium model creator pay model and sponsorship so this is for the first part of our study so we have conducted a systematic review with specific keywords and with specific inclusion and exclusion criteria and we have identified from the literature these eight models but like we said these eight models are not enough now we will move to the second stage where we will be talking with the experts and to validate it so in this context we have chosen carefully experts based on their profile which should include OER as their research interest good publication record in this area and relevant position in active OER organizations and as a result we have obtained 30 experts who are OER UNESCO chairs in several countries editors of OER journals professors and the researchers working on OER in several leading organizations such as UNESCO called ICD and Alexa actually some of our colleagues are also here today for the experts we asked them first do you agree or disagree with those eight models that we have identified from the literature this is one two we have asked them do you have any other models maybe which have not mentioned in the literature but these models could also be efficient in maintaining the sustainability of creating OER and third we asked them to rate the maturity of each model so for instance we can see like some of the examples that were given by our experts so for instance in the previous classification where governmental and institutional models were provided separately most experts highlighted that many universities are having many governmental funding so at the end the government is still responsible on both these models therefore separating them is not an accurate way so here our experts suggested that we combine both governmental and institutional models because most of the money coming from institution are basically coming from the government especially when we are talking about public schools then also another example from the inputs given by our experts is they are suggested by donation and endowment models should be merged together as they have the same goal so here as you can see that they have given us several inputs and based on these inputs we have revised our sustainability models and we have come up with a new taxonomy at the end we have obtained 10 OER sustainability models that have been validated by our experts the first one is through internal funding means the university covers the cost of creating delivering and disseminating OER as part of of each annual budget in line with its mentioned mandate means that the the university will be focusing on creating and disseminating OER from their budget the second model is by practice participating in OER networks so here the university pays to be part of a larger consortium that handles the university OER related activities such as the creation delivery and dissemination of OER and here one famous example is OERU consortium the third model is through public funding so OER are funded through international national or local public funding typically through grants and funded projects one is through endowment donations so here OER could be supported by providing charities or collected through private donations or crowdfunding the fifth one is through sponsorship or advertisement so means we could give the resources for free but from time to time we will promote or advertise for something in return the sixth one is about providing services to learners means we provide them the resources for free but at the same time we can ask them for some services and they need to pay for it for instance I could give you the learning materials for free as OER but in return for instance if you want to get your certificate at the end of the course you need to pay for it so here we are respecting the definition and the concept of OER but we provide some paid services so if you want to use services you need to pay for them also the seventh one is about offering learning related data to companies so here the cost of OER is addressed by selling data and analytics about learning activities so but then we have the by producing OER on demand means if someone asks for OER then we will do it for them and they need to pay us ninth by relying on OER authors means the authors of OER will take the responsibility of creating OER and they will take into consideration everything including their time like payment and everything and finally community based model so then the university relies on community whose members bear the cost of producing OER as a combination of any of the previous models so as you can see here we have obtained 10 different models by the experts some of them are already mentioned in our literature review and others are newly mentioned by our experts and in the next slide we can see like when we ask them to rate the maturity of these sustainability models so as you can see here we ask them would you please like rate the maturity of each model and we can see that the first model is through public funding which is the most common model that has been used or implemented by most universities each which is sustainability through public funding and interestingly we can see that the last model which is the least used model is by offering learning related data to companies and this is totally understandable because here we are talking about privacy and despite that this model is used we can see some examples for each model so despite that the last model is used but a lot of experts raised some concerns about like privacy of students and it's not quite good like to sell like their data or their like learning analytics performance to other companies so here we can see that the classification of experts have been reported by them and you can see like from the topest model to the least model and this study has led to a publication so this publication was in a journal and also we have a full report published on our smart learning institute university later on I could copy paste the link in chat for you in case you want to have it and thank you so much for for your attention and if you have any questions please let me know thank you so much thank you very much for sharing all this relevant information on evolution of OER sustainability models last but not least speaker will be mrs. Tillie Jensen we are very pleased to have you here mrs. Jensen is assistant professor in accounting at Atabaska University and expert in digital learning technologies and she will be talking about high education perspectives in in some types for the production and use of open educational resources mrs. Jensen you have the floor thank you very much for inviting me to to speak and thank you to the other speakers for their very interesting presentations before we begin I would like to very briefly provide an introduction to my teaching philosophy and OER background in the courses I teach namely accounting peer reviewed resources are key to optimizing a student's educational experience I believe I have an ethical responsibility to remove financial barriers associated with those key learning resources based on the mission of Atabaska University and I personally have the power to do so by creating OER textbooks which I've done to date in the three courses I am responsible for cost savings of more than 2.8 million dollars have been realized by using OER textbooks so it makes me wonder if one person can achieve a 2.8 million dollar cost saving what can all of the or the majority of faculty members across the globe achieve and enhance accessibility for students so what I am going to talk briefly about is my experience and encouraging the production of OERs and the use of OERs and my belief that we need a paradigm shift in terms of the production of OERs a primary barrier based on my experience is finding champions OER champions at the faculty level it is difficult to obtain workload relief creating a a comprehensive OER is a mammoth task and finding someone who is passionate about teaching and learning in their subject area someone who believes wholeheartedly in removing financial barriers is is difficult at our institution in our faculty we are awarded with points we have to keep a tally sheet um based on our intellectual outputs namely publishing in high-ranking journals and the production of OERs is has only recently been valued with 30 points so 40 points for the publishing in a high ranking journal 30 points for an OER but it's a one-time point system so you're not awarded points many points for updating those OERs so it's there the incentive needs to be there the lesson learned is that creating an OER for a a particular subject requires a team of champions rather than just one champion because of the workload involved in producing that by involving people across multiple institutions the adoption rate I believe would be enhanced significantly the buy-in would be there if people are involved the next barrier is publishers pay authors to write textbooks I was a an author with a publisher in North America and I left that role because I found that we were hurting students hurting accessibility so I began managing the creation of OERs in my my field we need executive support for our champions so that they can create those OER resources we were able to get a very large grant from an accounting body in the province where I reside and that allowed us to attract champions you need to partner with corporate sponsors we were able to develop a significant partnership with lyrics learning Inc who provides us with a digital assessment tool and has integrated our OER within that digital platform so it's been very successful our student reviews are outstanding and students have asked actually asked for more of these types of resources the lesson learned here is that we need to reward and recognize our champions this is not done it may seem trivial but I believe that this is one of the better ways to inform the university community as well as the public about the importance of OERs I think it is possible to negotiate that a percent of the cost savings realized by adopting OERs go to the authors for research and study I think that's important that there be financial rewards to incentivize this was mentioned by both of the other speakers credibility of the OER textbook it is essential that these resources are peer reviewed and that it is integrated throughout the production process of that that resource to optimize peer review I think it needs to be done by a team so that it can be advertised that a particular resource is of a quality nature so again a barrier to encouraging the use of OERs is finding champions those individuals who are very passionate about the use of OERs and enhancing accessibility for our students across the globe to remove that barrier again we need to ensure that faculty are rewarded in some way for using OERs and in my particular faculty there is no reward system for the use of OERs and I think by doing that we would incentivize more faculty members to look at and adopt the use of OERs it is critical to have support from the top at the post-secondary institution you need a champion at that level as well so that people are encouraged and continually reminded that this is part of the institution's mission the lesson learned again you need to celebrate your champions who are the individuals using OERs what is the data of indicating how many are using it the cost savings academic freedom is a barrier often my colleagues when I speak to them about the availability and the potential use of OER resources they tell me it is their right to choose what they want and nobody has the right to intervene in the choice of their resources so that is a huge challenge and the question for me is should executive require OERs when credible peer reviewed resources are actually available the lesson learned and this is my personal perspective please is this a concern over academic freedom or is it resistance to change or a bit of both and I think it is resistance to change it is hard for people to change from a publisher provided textbook very costly and often not a consideration to faculty it is difficult for them to change to an OER resource so we need to educate and show people the OER availability credibility of OER textbooks I can't emphasize this enough this is what I continually hear from my colleagues is that OER resources are not credible they are not of a quality nature part of this is being pushed by publishers publishers have a vested interest in ensuring that faculty do not move to OER it's it would ultimately be their their death if all faculty members chose OER so it is in their interest to discredit OER and that's unfortunate so we need to publish a list of who reviewed OER as well as who has used and uses OER so transparency is is key and and advertising that as much as we possibly can again resistance to change it's related to the academic freedom should executive require the use of OER and I know there are institutions in the United States where the executive has said that part of their mission is to increase the use of OER across the institution in this year we will use 20 percent OER next year we'll try to move to 25 percent 30 percent etc so what's needed here is a global paradigm shift to legitimize OER and it has to be both top down and bottom up so in in summary the key to produce and use OERs we need champions at both the faculty and executive level those champions have to be incentivized in some way financially with workload reduction there are different incentives that work for different individuals as we all know we have found that partnerships are credit critical for my field we partnered with accounting professional accounting organizations as well as corporate sponsors it is expensive to create quality OER resources and at at the Basque University as has already been stated by the two previous speakers part of that the OER production was funded by the institution part by the partners we also need a paradigm shift we need people to believe in the necessity of OERs and the value and credibility of OERs if you have any questions please contact me and I would also like to indicate that we're doing a research project on a massive open online course in introductory financial accounting we have institutional support on this project we have corporate partner lyrics learning Inc and the course will be provided free to all students it's based on international financial reporting standards so should be acceptable globally for those trees who follow international financial reporting standards and we will be reporting the results of this research project within one year but I'm very excited about this it's opening very soon and I think it's a great example of a and potentially successful OER thank you very much for your time thank you mrs. Jensen for this very inspiring intervention thank you to all speakers as we come to the Q&A session of this webinar I'm going to hand over to my colleague Eleni who will take care of passing on the main question we received throughout the presentation Eleni the floor is yours thank you Eshatu so the first question comes from Tarek Benyusev who is asking professor clearly that the OER have a cost and can we talk about OER being available only for high-income countries I'm not quite sure what he meant by that but I would like to say at least like for OER it's true we give it for free but the problem is or the challenge is we need to pay for the infrastructure for instance like the online servers for instance the internet for instance like also we need to pay for designers to design like the repository or like the learning system or whatever also we need to pay for instance for teachers or champions to develop these OER so basically yes we need to pay a lot of money but at the same time we still need to give it for free for our learners or users so this is the big challenge the challenge is how can we maintain those costs but we don't ask users or learners to pay for us so that's why we are now thinking about how to develop OER in a very efficient way and sustainable way by keeping or by respecting the OER definition and concept but at the same time we still get a revenue somehow through these models at least from my perspective which would be helpful to maintain OER thank you professor if I understand him correctly there is a second question regarding incentives and policies both from Huing, Tran, Huy and Val Mendez so what policies could we suggest to governments to eliminate obstacles and generate scalable OER initiatives and how can we support local education ecosystems, local content producers to generate OER instead of proprietary education resources so that that can be answered by all speakers if someone wants to take the floor I'll mention policies because we've done a lot of work with policies at all levels of the government and I think the the idea of working top down and bottom up has always been a mainstream issue for OER work and policy and and getting people on board I think the first issue which is almost sort of a common sense and it's part of the OER recommendation is that publicly funded resources need to be available to the public and so the the issue of openness in this sense is it's a it's a battle that's easier to win when we try to convince people small spectrums of economic of the economic spectrum that public resources need to be available to the public it's it's kind of an easy win it's not easy to get done but it's an easy argument to make the other issue which I think our colleague just mentioned in the end was we're still quite unbalanced in terms of awareness I mean we we a couple of years back we're a little a little bit more we had this general sense that awareness was not a problem anymore and people are kind of aware what OER is and we can move on to getting them the conditions to produce and share but we're still very far from having awareness of what OER is of course what copyright is and copyright law people are very unaware of this and all of us I think that work with OER know this from day-to-day interactions and making more people aware that can become these kinds of champions and participate in this work together I think is the is the bottom-up thing that that still needs to be done quite often. Thank you, thank you, Ted. Professor Jenschen do you have anything to add? I agree with my colleague that education is of faculty and post-secondary institution executive is key here and as I said we need a paradigm shift and and I hate to use this example but the pandemic actually legitimized online learning because it had to happen that was the only way for post-secondaries to continue and and we need some global event to shift that the paradigm for OER in the same way as the pandemic shifted the paradigm for online learning so I don't wish for another pandemic but we need something to to demonstrate to people that the necessity the absolute necessity of of OER. Thank you. Thank you. So another question for Professor Tritley about his publication if he the models he discussed have been piloted or field tried in any of the countries? Thank you. Actually we have started of course with slow steps and small steps so we have started with our like university context by discussing like the possibilities of having bonuses and getting promoted based on OER publications because as we all know that most of the university systems are based on SSCI and SCI papers so now we are trying like to talk with them in order to include OER and open access publications as one of the criterias to get promoted also for some bonuses if you create your courses as OER and publish them online but also I would like to point out that those systems come up also with some challenges for instance if you are talking about like promotion or advertisement I know some of my colleagues are like from the educational technology background and now if you are talking about like advertising for something some of the experts or like some of the pedagogues also mentioned that maybe those advertisement could disturb the learning the learning process when students are taken an online course for instance so here even the way of implementing those models require us a lot of like careful design and a lot of investigation in advance before we start implementing them so we are definitely we definitely start working on couple of these models for instance with Alexa they have the OER hub Alexa OER hub and now we are working with them to create some champions in the Arab region and how they can use OER in 22 Arab countries so as we said we started slow and step by step but definitely a lot of challenges come with those models thank you so much. Thank you another question coming from Paul West about license there is a risk of license trolls abusing users because of clauses that may be in the legal fine print will UNESCO help to analyze and explain the consequences of custom written open licenses does anyone have a reply on that? I can take that question if you like hello yes please. Yes part of the work of the on the OER recommendation looks at licenses so what we are able to do is to provide links to experts and worldwide who can find you can respond to these issues and also just to say that one of the points of the sustainability in the recommendation is about the the faithful translation of OER licenses into different languages because that's another issue that comes up not just the fine print but the lost in translation or mistranslation or issues such as that so this is an issue that is part of the work being done in the framework of the recommendation. Thank you thank you Jaina would any of the speakers like to react? I'll say something just because I think we've we've we've done a really good job in championing around creative commons licenses as part of the the OER ecosystem and I think that that solves a lot of these problems in terms of standardizing licenses but we also have to recognize that other other possibilities exist and that creative common licenses don't necessarily address all the needs of every government and every institution. We've had discussions with governments that simply don't want to use that kind of license and they don't see it as appropriate for them and so I think that we're going to we're going to eventually have to face discussing the appropriateness of these licenses and whether they in what context do they fit and where they don't and where they don't we'll have to find other solutions. Thank you thank you all for your time on this we really appreciate it and all the speakers for the thought-provoking presentations we will be back in September with a new series of webinars many many events to come and we are looking forward to your participation thank you


With extreme fire conditions and unsettled weather in the forecast, residents throughout Northern California, including in the wider region around Lake Tahoe, are reminded to listen closely to local authorities and begin preparations to evacuate. With red flag conditions possible over the coming days, the call door fire could spread rapidly into more populated communities. An evacuation warning means there's impending danger to life or property. If a warning is given, assume an evacuation order will follow. Start gathering important family and pet items. And if you feel like you or anyone in your family may need extra time to get out, don't wait. Leave when an evacuation warning is issued. An evacuation order means there's immediate threat. Get out now. It's critical to follow all directions from law enforcement to assure a safe and efficient evacuation. And if you live in a fire prone area and at any point you feel uncomfortable or unsafe, evacuate immediately. Don't wait for a formal notification. It is always better to evacuate too early than too late. Remember, don't wait. Evacuate.


Hello and welcome to International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch where we bring you some of the major news developments from across the world. We begin with an update on the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as the number of reported cases is at roughly 426,000 worldwide. Of these, there are currently close to 300,000 active cases and nearly 19,000 deaths have been reported. Italy and the United States stand neck-to-neck with nearly 54,000 and 53,000 cases respectively. Cases in South Africa rose by over 150 in one day and are at over 700. These countries are putting in place strong measures. New Zealand has declared an emergency and Thailand is said to be considering the same. European leaders are meeting via video conference tomorrow as are the leaders of the G20. Meanwhile, after much speculation, the Tokyo Olympics that were scheduled for July this year have been postponed and will be held no later than summer 2021, according to media reports. On the positive side, China has eased restrictions on the Hubei province, the original hotspot of the pandemic, after almost no new local cases were reported for nearly a week. However, if there is one person who is unfazed by the coronavirus pandemic, it seems to be Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who made a stunning series of statements yesterday. In a televised address, Bolsonaro dismissed the gravity of the pandemic and criticized the measures of social isolation that have been decreed by governors of several states. He said that the press is causing panic and hysteria in Brazilian society while reporting on the coronavirus. As of yesterday, in Brazil, there were nearly 2,247 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 46 deaths. However, according to Bolsonaro, state and municipal authorities should abandon the concept of scorched earth and return to normal. He questioned the motives behind school closures since the at-risk group is about 60 years old and again said that Brazil needs to guarantee jobs during the crisis. The statements were made on national radio and television channels on the night of Tuesday, March 24. During his pronouncement, Bolsonaro said that when the press exaggerated what they spoke about the pandemic and exploited the case of Italy, he added that God would empower scientists to cure the virus and call the pandemic just a little cold. He also added that 90% of the people that will be infected will not have symptoms. Furthermore, the president declared it since he used to be an athlete, he does not have to be worried and will not feel anything. At the time of the president's declaration, that is at 8.30 at night, fresh Casero that's mobilizations where people bang pots and pans in rejection of Bolsonaro were carried out in several cities. It's the eighth consecutive day of protests motivated above all by the position of Bolsonaro in response to the social crisis and public health crisis provoked by coronavirus. The United States Congress and the administration of President Donald Trump have agreed upon a deal for a national relief package in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak. As the United States is fast becoming a major hotspot with close to 800 deaths, the government has struggled to come up with a proper emergency plan. Even though the final draft of the deal is still being prepared, after a marathon closed towards negotiation meeting between the Trump administration and the Democratic Party led House of Representatives, the government has declared that the deal is done. The deal will pave the way for a $2 trillion investment in boosting medical infrastructure in the country, support for establishments and firms that are going to be affected and reportedly compensation for workers. There have been disagreements between the government and the opposition over the lack of support for daily wage workers and the limited scope for rent and eviction freezes. In the meanwhile, President Trump is already planning on having the social distancing measures implemented in various parts of the country rolled back by Easter. Such a plan will be against multiple warnings and advice given by the public health experts and by the WHO in dealing with the pandemic. Meanwhile, in a dramatic broadcast to the country, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a complete lockdown of the country starting today. Prime Minister Modi has asked everyone to stay indoors for 21 days in a bid to contain the spiralling coronavirus up-and-down break in the country. The central government of India led by Modi later announced an infusion of Rs 150 billion or close to US$2 billion into the healthcare system, mostly to purchase such essential tools as personal protective equipment or PPEs and ventilators. India, home to over 1.3 billion people is already reported over 562 cases, as of the morning of March 25th with 11 deaths. Even before the Prime Minister's speech, 30 of the 37 states and union territories in the country have partial or complete lockdowns in place. While lockdowns by states were done in a phased manner, the central government's sudden announcement induced widespread panic and confusion. The announcement had very little clarity on several crucial matters, even though the government later published circulars detailing and assuring people that all basic services and goods including groceries and medicines would be available, the situation on the ground is very different. Reports on the ground had talked about people hoarding groceries from their local stores while suppliers have all but closed down. Even bureaucrats and the police are not very clear about the details of the lockdown. Opposition parties in India have criticized the abrupt nature of the shutdown and also demanded that the government come up with a relief plan for daily wage workers, the homeless and other underprivileged sections. And while India's central government is facing criticism for its unclear response, one state in the country has won praise across the world for the way it has handled COVID-19. We are talking about the state of Kerala which is ruled by the left democratic front government. Here is a video feature on how the government and the people of Kerala have worked to combat the pandemic. That's all we have for this episode of the International Daily Roundup. No more about these stories visit our website peoplesdispatch.org. Thanks for watching.


Sinobu's three main opponents gave him victory by splitting from the People's Democratic Party, PDP, after the 2019 presidential election. These were words of the Minister of Works and Housing Babatunde Fashola, the presidential candidates of the Labour Party, Pitao B. Atikwa-Babaka of PDP and Rabi Konkosiri of the new Nigeria People's Party, NNPP, were members of the former PDP before they decarmed. In Fashola's words, politics is game of numbers and numbers have arithmetic equations, additions and multiplications. APC was adding and multiplying.


Yes, we are here. We're still here. We're gonna be with you throughout this here on yes And you know sometimes we get some pretty special guests in this case We do our man Adam out of vino is back.  I'm trying I'm trying We'll see we'll see what happens, but uh No, I mean this this zoom life is real. So just trying to take it take advantage. Yeah We we all are now we are all firm believers in zoom Everybody who's who's any like has any broadcast association now has gotten intimately familiar with zoom. You know Adam like you and I We both grew up in New York different areas of New York But ended up facing each other in high school as has been famously documented now where I I So proudly popped out to shallow field against you celebrated pop out of all time It really is man well because I mean I've told the story before but it was my junior year your senior year I believe okay, you graduated o3. Yeah, yeah, and I graduated o4 from high school and Like you know in those days you just get like whispers of like, you know Yeah, y'all this guy supposed to be nasty or whatever and like oh, yeah this dude throws 90 and I was what you know Like 90 might as well be a hundred when you're in high school, you know And then I remember I saw the the when I saw your slider It was like the first time I saw like a hard Nasty breaking pitch where it's just like wait, that's way harder than the fastballs I usually see and so yeah popping out against you after looking at that slider whiz by me for strike one I felt pretty good about man. I love it at that time You don't you don't think that anybody's noticing so it's kind of funny to know that maybe you're the guy that people are Whispering about I mean I've been on the other side of that of course, so it's kind of funny You know, did you play against Pedro Alvarez during that time? Yeah, yeah played with them I've played with them on the team called the New York Giants I was like kind of a ringer me and this kid Rob Yotis would go up uptown and play for this for the Giants and Pedro played on that team. I remember him as kind of like a like a like a chubby second baseman But he hit like huge home runs I remember we played in the tournament in Connecticut once and he hit like three home runs and the fourth time he got up to bat They wouldn't pitch to him They were throwing him balls and so he yelled to the guy in Spanish like hey, Venneca like throw it right here And so he did and he hit a fourth home run And it was like incredible so but then I played against them and he homered off me I remember one time at Bergen Beach in Brooklyn, but um, yeah, I've known him for a long time There's a certain pride. I feel like that tethers Different Northeast baseball players together, right? Because when you think about players who make it in the majors a lot of times We think about you know kids who grew up being able to play all year round outside You know and I know there are various facilities now that have evolved for playing year-round indoors, you know in the Northeast But it's much different and you're obviously at an advantage if you're in a warm weather Climate where you can play, you know outside all year round But there's that element and then there's another element of it, which is not only do you play? You know your high school ball in the Northeast, but you also play your college ball there One of my good friends Joe Panic is part of that group and I know he takes great pride in it I mean Adam, how real is that club?  I mean from for us growing up I remember even what we would go to tournaments like We would scare the other teams because we had a lot of Latin players and we were real loud and you know the way New Yorkers can be and You know, I mean, let's call it what it was. We would just think that those kids were soft I mean they didn't have to grow up with the crappy fields and the cold weather and they had we felt like they had it all on a plate for them like Scouts and all that and we were like grinding. So yeah, that's kind of how it was I mean we took pride in that not only when I was in high school, but when I was in college So we love when the southern teams will come up to us and then you know We would give them a licking and kind of send them back to their warm weather What was the like what was the sort of the toughest field you played on? In the city and high school you think so the the parade grounds Which is like a pretty like a legendary field in Brooklyn I mean, it's just at the time. It's been renovated since but at the time it was just like one of those, you know No grass in the infield There there might be a soccer game going on in the outfield You might have to kick some people off the field with your permit to get on the field to begin with A lot of kids are wearing mouthpieces because there's rocks everywhere And you might catch a ball up in your face Did you ever I don't know if you ever had this experience But did you ever like have a field that was so hard that you were like afraid to even slide on it? Like you knew your knee was getting busted up like yes I didn't even want to slide on some of the field. I can remember a game where it was one of my friends. Oh I forget if it was it I had three other seniors on the team with with me my senior year And I forget if it was my boy Greg Dreyfus who now works for the MLB PA actually or Andrew Nackman or John Cronor It was one of those three guys had a hit sometime early in the game like slid into second base and just thought like the pant leg Was gone from the knee down like just totally torched.  Let me ask you you want to play a little game of Yankees Mets or both?  All right, all right Tony Clark. I know we played for the Yankees I'm just gonna say Yankees Both he played for both really. Yeah, I actually forgotten that he spent time with the Mets. That was tough one This one's a tough one too. By the way, I should preface this. These are all pretty difficult. All right, all right Tony Torasco Mets He played for both both. Yes Yes, I don't remember him on the Yankees. I know man. I know he played for both that you think when we think about Tony Torasco We think about Jeter's home run. Yeah, he was out there in right field. Yeah, exactly. Were you at that game? I was not at that game I would definitely watch that game, but I was not at that game. Yeah. Um, all right. Let's see Mike Lowell Michael Loll Red Sock Marlin, man, I Guess Yankees. Yeah Yankees. Yeah, yeah brief brief time with the Yankees. This is interesting one Jeff Carstens I know we played for the Yankees Not sure if he played for both. So I'm just gonna say Yankees. You're right Yankees. All right You're handling this well, man All right, Trot Nixon Man Yeah, right you associate more with another team. All right, I have no idea if I'm gonna get some bets on this one. Boom nailed it Nailed it All right, this is a tough one Gerald Williams All right, obviously Yankee so since it's tough, I think it's both I Way to use the context clues. He was so fast. I used to love Gerald Williams.  He was like the first guy, right? Yeah, I just remember him charging Pedro Oh Yeah, dude, he also like I mean he's Jeter's like he's Jeter's Tom Hagan You know, I mean I really I mean he or he's one of his best friends I always feel like there should be like a documentary series on the friends of Jeter, you know Because I feel like he keeps a circle close. He has his people who he trusts, you know He's not just letting anybody in Gerald Williams has been a longtime mainstay of the Jeter clan Wow, so he's keeping it tight. He's not telling anybody outside of the family what he's thinking at any time That's right. He's not pulling a sunny All right, how about this one Mike Glavin? Yeah, Matt. Yep. Nicely done very nicely. He's actually the head coach at my college now. Oh, really northeastern Yeah, Tom Clavin's brother Mike Clavin head coach. Oh, so I met so I know him a little bit So that one I had a little advantage. Yeah, that one you should get correct by the way one other thing on the on the Jeter front How about did you see he's his house is being rented by Tom Brady? I Did not see that but that's epic. That's pretty make sense. I guess Like how awesome is that like yeah, like if you were thinking of sort of like the parallel sports lives You see Jeter Brady, right like those two guys now. They're basically she's gonna share a home Guys in Tampa Bay. That's just weird. It was it was an interesting choice. Wasn't it? Yes, definitely All right. Here's I'll I'm gonna give you one more than two bonus All right, all right Brooke Fordeis Met yeah nailed it dude. You're crushing this All right, two more bonus questions. Yeah, I these two men Managed both the Yankees and the Mets. However, we want to just dial them up as players So Joe Torrey as a player I think Matt nailed it Nailed it and Yogi as a player. Well Yankees And Matt. Yes. Yes. Yes. Wow like a nor girl season or something. Yes, and then I know he managed the Mets Oh, yeah, you already said that so that yes, yep He he he managed him played and for the Yankees obviously he he managed and played so but I got to say Adam that was a Pretty impressive man. I got a long history of baseball card, you know pack opening and that sort of thing So me and my friend Jared, I'm sure he'll be proud of me on this one Maybe a little disappointed about the first two that I didn't get them both, but we'll see isn't Jared the die-hard Star Wars fan, too Yes. Yes. All right. Well, I don't I don't want to get ahead of myself But assuming you don't end our yes network zoom relationship I think the next one of these we may do a Star Wars trivia game pitting me against you or you against me I Think I think you have the advantage. I better start studying up better get Jared on the phone man Man, Jared Jared stuff to beat. He's tough to beat. He's on the next level Well, Adam, thank you for doing this man. Stay safe. Stay well and and we'll do it again sometime soon Hopefully with some Star Wars trivia. All right sounds good. Same to you stay safe