 And welcome back to this session at the conference today. I'm excited to introduce you to Grant Potter and Ann Marie Scott, who will be leading this session in just a moment. And before I hand over to you, I wanted to say that one of the quotes that you included in your session description in the program really jumped out at me. It says, from an open ETC member in 2020, I feel excited again for the first time in a while about a real community working together. And I am so thrilled to hear you tell that story. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to you now. And I ask all of those watching us live to say hello in the chat, introduce yourself, and enjoy this conference session with Grant and Ann Marie. Thank you. Thanks, Marin. Good morning everybody, or good afternoon everybody, or wherever you are. I am in Western Canada on the unceded territory of this equipment people here in British Columbia. And Grant, if you were about as far away from me as you can possibly get and still be in Canada, I think. So do you wanna say hello as well? Indeed, hello everyone. And we're coming to you. I'm coming to you from the Atlantic Time Zone in Nova Scotia, it's great to be here. So yeah, so this morning, we're gonna spend a little time talking about the open ETC, open ed tech co-op, an endeavor that's been running here in BC for about five years. And it's a digital education platform built on quite a different paradigm to some of the digital education platforms I think we've all been experiencing in extreme measures over the last year. And we want to really pick apart the foundations on which it's built, the kind of founding philosophy. And then tell you a little bit about the, how it's played out in the pandemic and what kinds of things it's been able to foster in the pandemic. So we called our talk Fostering Resiliency with Platform Co-operatism. And those of you who heard Marin do the introduction, will have heard Marin steal the quote from our opening slide because one of the key features of this platform is the extent to which it's about networking people and community together, not necessarily technology for delivering content. It's built on a fundamentally different paradigm. It's also built on a shared ownership and shared operating model. But I think it's probably useful to start with a few definitional pieces. So I'm gonna pass over to Grant who's gonna take us through those. And I'm gonna try change the slides. So many of you have likely heard that turn the platform economy. The platform economy being the emergence or the sharing economy. You've probably heard that term before of the emergence of the last, perhaps 10 years or more. So, and some scholars who are researching the emergence of this forum, platform economy, to find the platform economy is generally two types, innovation platforms, innovation frameworks and then matchmaking services. So your matchmaking services would be kind of like Airbnb, Uber and those types of things. So there's been a lot of excitement about the platform economy, but there's also been over the last three years increasing levels of concern over exploitation that going on within the platform economy. So in that many of these innovation platforms and matchmaking services in the platform economy are extractive and they are having all short and long-term effects on the folks that are being extracted from. So next slide, please. And then extending that a little bit further, Ben Williamson has done some great stuff. We have a link here. Anything, all of our slides have links on them. So feel free to jump off any of the slides. He's done some great research and some writing on the platform university. If you look back 15, maybe 20 years, universities would host software, they'd license software hosted on their campus and over the last decade or more, increasingly it's hosted elsewhere and licenses are applied. Each license has gradients so that giving different levels of operability, different bill levels of visibility within the platform. And so Ben has raised applied to say that the platforms are actually, instead of the universities taking advantage of the platforms, the platforms are coming in and basically occupying the university, becoming critical to the operational success of the universities. Next slide, please. So that the idea of the platform co-op has been emerging over the last few years as a response within the economy to that extractive measure that we see in the Uber where, you know, ride-sharing where the folks that are doing the work and actually make up all of this platform are demanding more voice, more control in the governance, the terms of their labor. And so you'll seeing platforms themselves the entire framework for the matchmaking being created and organized by the members that provide the service. So in the platform cooperative, borrow many of the principles from the cooperative movement. And so we have a photo there of some of those slides shared governance and some leadership as well as input into the platforms themselves and some of the architecture there. So next slide, please. Oh, trying to get there. Let me press the buttons. Okay. So Grant's given us a little bit of info of the kind of bigger picture of platforms, this kind of increasingly extractive nature of platforms and some of the bigger pushback in broad thinking against them. But if we drill down into why platforms are particularly important in education and digital education, the first thing I think if we go right back to the Cape Town Declaration, that calls out the potential of platforms and open infrastructures to support open education, particularly networking educators and creating communities of practice. So that kind of potential for platforms, that positive potential for platforms has been there for quite some time in terms of thinking. Though I would say as Grant has outlined, it's not necessarily playing out that way. And indeed there's been some very, very recent research like early this year. There's a special issue of critical studies in education that really drills into this idea of the digital education platform. Does some really good work to quantify the characteristics of a digital education platform and really unpick what digital education platforms do inside the academy. And we've pulled out this one little quote about them as key educational devices in the governing of education. They really can shape and frame education and the activities of the academy. But I really like the end of that quote where it calls out the generation of different potentialities. And quite a lot of the studies in that particular issue are not wholly dystopian, but are really exploring some of the more commercial angle on this. But what we have done with the open ATC is try to build a platform much more in the spirit of the Cape Town Education Declaration and think about those different possibilities, different potentialities. And I think that's fundamental. If you can build platforms to extract value from the academy, you can equally build them to invest in the academy and create value in the academy and create sustainability in the academy. So I think it's really interesting to pick apart this idea of the digital platform and this idea of potentialities and then explicitly design for the alternative to those extractive platforms. So hopefully what we're gonna show you over the next few slides will show you how that can be done in practice. So we're gonna talk a little bit more now about the open ATC itself, how it works, what it is, and then cover off a few examples to show you how it works in practice. So the first thing is just a light overview of our kind of sustainability and governance model. We have leadership and administration from a series of founders and advisors. So there's three founders, Grant, Brian Lam, Tannis Morgan and then a couple of us working as advisors myself and Clint Belonde from BC campus. And then that's kind of governance group widens out to what we call our institutional leads. So there are, you'll see on the next slide, 13 or so different institutions in BC who are using the platform. And so we have institutional leads from a number of those organizations who meet with us as a governance group and have some kind of private chat groups for helping shape and manage the service. And then there are organizations in BC that exist at the sector level that support sharing across the sector. And I think this is really important in terms of kind of the cultural context for why something like the OpenETC can work. So we have BC campus who are very generously providing us with an amount of funding to support the OpenETC. And then BC Nets who provide shared infrastructure services for the sector. So we're able to build this service on top of server infrastructure that's owned and operated inside BC, which is incredibly important for adherence to BC privacy laws and to make this a safe and sustainable place that BC institutions can use and play in. I mentioned earlier, we have 13 out of 25 post-secondary institutions in British Columbia using the OpenETC. Very different types of use, very different levels of use at the different organizations. In some institutions, there are very large numbers of sites perhaps on our platform. UVic might be a good example of that. Where it's being used to provide an e-portfolio service for students, but it's actually maybe quite a small section of the institution that's using the platform, a few classes with high numbers of students doing e-portfolios. And then if we look at other institutions, maybe like North Island College or Kamosan, and we're gonna talk about them in a couple of slides time, they're using it to underpin the delivery of their entire teaching and learning support. So small numbers of sites maybe, but very, very high usage of them across the entire institution. And we do have one other institution, not in BC. We have some colleagues from Yukon University also using the platform due to some inter-provincial sharing arrangements in place. But yeah, around half of the sector in BC is using the OpenETC in one way or another. And I think what we're seeing is that there's a gap maybe more in the community college space that the OpenETC is starting to fill in terms of infrastructure and services that complements what's available inside the institutions. Whereas some of the universities maybe have a slightly wider, richer set of provision on hand already. And that's really important in terms of sustainability and providing something of value to the sector that maybe individual institutions couldn't do on their own, but by coming together and doing it in the shared model, we can. So we can have nice things if we all play together. The short hand of that. And Grant, perhaps you could talk about the tech. Indeed, there are the technologies that the OpenETC has played with over the last number of years. The bulk and the core of the technologies that probably get, not probably, they do get the greatest amount of use, our WordPress and MatterMode. WordPress, I'm sure you're all very familiar with, but MatterMode is, think of that like a team-based communication platform that's an alternative to Slack. Folks have used things like Microsoft Teams and Slack, well MatterMode is like an open source part and allows us to bring some more customizations to it and have a little bit more flexibility as well as access to the data privacy aspects too. So as you can see there, lots of growth over, especially over the last year, 2,400 accounts, over 2,400 accounts with over 2,800 websites, lots of growth within organizationally by instructional designers or teams that are working on it. And then also in many cases, it's used by classes as an alternative to, you know, mixed feelings from everyone in the LMS discussion forum. So I've seen great things happening with instructors and students in that team can increase animals. Next slide, please. Let's see. Sorry, I'm having problems with the technology just as well, I don't work in technology. We're gonna have to speed up a little bit because I can see our time is ticking away. So we're gonna rattle through a few examples for, you know, the kinds of things over the last year that the services facilitated. The first one is from Kamosan College, where this is a mostly face-to-face teaching college. And this very rapidly obviously had to pivot to online education, along with most of the rest of the world. And very, very quickly, Emily Schudel, the instructional designer there had to shift all of the e-learning tutorial material that she had to somewhere far more discoverable so that it could really underpin the complete support model that they were putting in place for faculty and then as it turned out for students as well. And I've put a link to her site here on the platform because that's one of the wonderful things. These are all open and discoverable and everybody can look at everybody else's stuff and learn. But yeah, this quote said, Emily basically spent a week shifting her material onto the OpenATC site. We provided her a way of making that information public to then underpin the support model they were putting in place in a way that her local infrastructure didn't support. And obviously in that one week to go can see the writing on the wall time, there is no time to spin up something else. So we were immediately there. And that site has been built out upon, as I say, they brought student support into it and it's now become a resource that's underpinning all of the academic activity there. And I've put another link in this slide because there's actually a little 20 minute audio interview on the OpenATC site with Emily as well if people want to listen to more of that story. The key thing is that by doing this and by bringing her faculty onto the platform for their support, they've started to experience what the OpenATC can offer and actually a number of follow-on faculty activities have fallen out of this and it's facilitated a lot of things that would otherwise have been difficult to do over the pandemic and that little interview will give you more on that. And I'll skip on to the next example. This is another kind of resiliency. Similar sort of use case, this is North Island College and two sites, one called Learn Anywhere and another called Teach Anywhere. Learn Anywhere focused at students, Teach Anywhere focused at academic staff. A similar use case, but Liesl Nak, who's the director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Innovation there was brand new into the institution, tentatively feeling her way up into setting up a Centre for Teaching and Learning and suddenly had to flip the entire institution to face-to-face teaching. And again, finding the internal infrastructures, internal processes didn't really make it easy to quickly make a huge amount of content available online, easily discoverable. She wanted people to be able to put it into Google and find it because the load that everybody was under making this pivot was substantial. And again, these are open sites. Everybody can see them. There's quite a lot of sharing of these examples that goes on in the Mattermost Channels around the OpenATC. So you can have a look and explore both of these sites as well. We do have another interview with Liesl which will get published on the OpenATC site soon and it gives a little bit more detail on this one too. The Learn Anywhere site, she had a wonderful quote in the interview we did with her where her students basically said, this is how we are surviving the pandemic, this site. This is what's helping us. So quite simple use cases, but being hugely impactful and hugely valuable in those organisations. Grant, I'll hand over to you. Indeed, and I know we don't have a lot of time left for questions so I just want to, the next three slides are just a few examples about the OpenATC has supported collaboration, peer production and open educational practice. So I'll let folks go through some of those slides and look. Two of them refer to some projects that you're going to hear about today and some other ATC folks that are going to present on some of the work that they've been doing over the last year. So I'll leave it at that and make sure that we leave some time for some questions. Thank you so much. That's fantastic. I'm really delighted at hearing so much and we had a lot of comments. So thank you to Tanez, Leo, Erwin, Allen, Brian who were in the chat. There seemed one question that I wanted to highlight from Tanez just now. So we'll bring that maybe up on the screen here for you guys to have a look at. So any thoughts Grant and Marie on the sort of small low resource institutions? Yeah, I was just thinking about that the other day that it, the cooperative platform, cooperative model that we're in right now, OpenATC, there's all opportunity and expertise in the pocket throughout the sector by creating a call-up opportunity where there's contributions, not contracts, you allow people to provide those in-kind contributions without having to adopt the entire soup to nuts, you know, arrangement, having to adopt the entire infrastructure to administration. So I do think that it creates that invitation to smaller institutions that might have fewer resources to join in a collective endeavor. I think that's super important, Grant. And one thing we heard in both the interviews with Liesl and Emily was the extent to which local IT departments were better or less well resourced and particularly in the pandemic flip have had so many calls on their time and effort that some of what the OpenATC has provided, I mean, it just, it wouldn't have happened, it couldn't have happened. So it's back to that, you know, if we play together, we can have nice things in the philosophy too. That sounds amazing. I have to say it's been so impressive to see how this project has come up leaps and bounds over the past 12 months. I can see a lot of love for this project in the chat and I'm sure that conversation will continue as well. We are pretty much up for time now. So I do want to encourage you to please post your links in the resources channel on Discord and to everybody who's joined us for this session, please show your love once more and your appreciation in the comments. For Grant and Anne-Marie, we've given a wonderful presentation. So thank you very much for joining us here. Nom, nom, nom.