 Okay, hello everyone and welcome to this webinar on creating and sharing your own open educational resources. My name is Sally Parsley and I'm the technical lead on the open education program at the International Centre for Eye Health here at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and I'm the webinar host for today. This is the last in the series of five monthly webinars we've been hosting which have been looking to explore how we as eye health educators can use information and communication technologies to innovate and collaborate across traditional institutional boundaries and teaching methods and today we're looking at the practicalities for educators of using open educational resources. What are the reasons we do or don't use OER in our practice and once we decide to use them, how can we get started, what are the key things we need to know and skills we should have. So I'm really delighted to have two staff members from the University of Cape Town South Africa to present on this today and I'm really looking forward to what Dr. Glenda Cox and Mr. Gregory Dole have to talk to us about. But before I hand over to the really interesting part of the webinar, I first have a little bit of housekeeping information and then I just want to give a little bit of introduction to what open education is, what OERs are and why here at the London School we think they're very interesting for anyone who's really not attended one of our webinars before and I apologize if you've been to a few and you've sat through those couple of minutes a couple of times now. So in terms of housekeeping, yes as I've said, well here are presentations first so that'll take about half an hour and then we'll have a Q&A session for about 15 minutes at the end. So as you listen to Glenda and Gregory and you have questions, please enter them into the questions tab on the menu. You should see a sort of menu on the right hand side which opens up using an orange tab. So please send in your questions to me using that and then I'll pose the questions in the Q&A session to our presenters. You can also download the presentations from the handout section of the menu tab. Sorry, I'm losing my notes and we're recording this session so just to let you know that that's happening and probably in five or six days we'll have the recording and the transcript ready and we'll be sending links to those to everyone who registered for the webinar. So if you have to leave early or you have trouble with accessing the webinar, don't worry we'll be able to send you everything later on. So just to start with those definitions that I was talking about, open education is defined by people in different ways and I think Glenda in particular will talk a bit more about this and it's very interesting once you start to think about it. But basically underpinning this philosophy of open is the idea that knowledge is a public good and it should be available to everyone who needs it when they need it. In terms of open education, what that kind of leads to is this idea that open education is activity to reduce barriers to participation in education and learning and it can be all sorts of things. So it can be reducing barriers, reducing cost of education or the requirements to take part in education. So this picture is of the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, which in the early 20th century got rid of its entrance requirements. It opened up its courses to many more Argentinians than had been able to attend it before. So basically if you had a secondary school degree and you could pass a straight forward entrance exam, you could attend any of their undergraduate courses. So it's been around for a long time, it's an idea. Other examples might be like online courses or sharing new ways of opening up ways to talk to each other, removing and reaching learners at a distance and so on. There's too many to talk about, that's why I get into a muddle, I get all excited about the different ways we can do this. So with the rise of the Internet, of course the focus of open education has moved online. It's a great opportunity to reach people at a distance and also the costs of sharing materials start to come down significantly. So open educational resources are educational materials, which usually online but not necessarily that have an open copyright license, which allows anybody to access them, download them, use them in their own practice, change them as they need to do and then share them with their own learners or other educators for free and without asking for permission from the original publisher. And that's a huge change from traditional copyright, which insists that if you're going to reuse material, you have to ask permission of the original copyright owner. And here are some examples of open educational resources that we produced here at the International Center for IHPS. And on the right there is an example of a logo of a common open copyright license Creative Commons. And I think Greg is going to talk about that a bit more later on. So in addition to open educational resources have come along open courses. So this is where you take a bunch of materials and you deliver a whole course using them. So typically open courses are free to access to anyone. So there's no registration restriction. If you have an internet connection and you're interested, you can access and use these courses for free. Some open courses don't use OER, but ours do. So it's, as I was saying, open education is defined in different ways by different people. So ICH and OER. In 2014, we were getting excited about these potentials for OER to address some of the key challenges that we know iCare training is facing in the world. And I'm not going to go into that today because I want to focus on Gregory and Glenda's presentations. But Dr. Daksha Patel and Professor Alan Foster from the International Center for iHealth went into this in a lot of detail in one of our earlier webinars. So if you're interested in the challenges we face as iCare educators, I encourage you to follow that up and I'll share the link at the end of the presentation today. So we decided we wanted to reach out across our traditional boundaries. We've been running a master's course for many years, but we thought we could reach a lot more people if we got into these idea of open courses and open education resources. So we created our first open course, Global Blindness, Planning and Managing iCare Services, in 2014. And we have been running it on the FutureLearn platform for the last couple of years. So we've had more than 6,000 people have accessed this course so far and we're getting very good feedback from both the learners and the educators who've had a look at the course, downloaded maybe one or two materials and in some cases downloaded the whole course or taken the whole course itself and adapted it and used it in their own contexts. And the previous webinar we went, we had Professor Colin Cook from University Cape Town and Dr. Niawira Moengi from Kenya who talked about their experiences of taking the whole course and using it in their own contexts. So we're very encouraged by how positive our experience has been and we're also very lucky to have acquired some funding. And we are in the middle of developing seven more open courses in key public health iCare topics. So just to let you know what's going on, we have four courses available at the moment, the Global Blindness one, our first one. Two courses, basic and a slightly more advanced course in ophthalmic epidemiology and another course on eliminating trachoma. And again at the end of the presentation, we'll have the link so that you could access and register for these courses if you're interested. And we have four more courses coming up soon over the next couple of years and diabetic eye disease we hope will be ready by the end of this year with retinopathy of prematurity research methods in ophthalmology and glaucoma by the end of 2019. OK, so I hope that gives you a kind of sense of why we're doing what we're doing and where we're up to. But today, we're really interested in how iCare educators get started. And what are the reasons they get involved? How can they do it? So I'm very pleased to hand you on, first of all, to our first presenter, Dr. Glenda Cox. She's a senior lecturer at the Center for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town. And her portfolio includes curriculum projects, teaching with technology innovation grants, open education resources, and staff development. She's recently completed her PhD in education and her research focused on explaining why academic staff choose to contribute or not to contribute their teaching resources as open educational resources. Glenda believes that supporting and showcasing UCT staff who are excellent teachers both in traditional face-to-face classrooms and in the online world is of great importance. She's passionate about the role of open education in the changing world of higher education. OK. OK, my presentation is going to be quite brief today. And I'm hoping to just open up a few conversations around possible tools and frameworks to look at open education in various institutions. So wherever you are as participants, to look at what's happening in your institution and whether your institution is kind of OER ready, and then also whether you are OER ready. And a lot of this work comes from this project that I was involved on, the research on open education resources for development. So today I'm going to focus a little bit more on that. So Sally's already introduced me. So I have recently completed a PhD, but I'm not going to be talking about that work today. Today I'm going to be focusing on the role for deep work. I'm going to talk a little bit about the evidence and what we're calling an OER adoption pyramid, which looks at the barriers to OER. But also if those factors are in place, also enablers of OER, and then just a little bit on an open education practitioner example. And then I'll hand over to Greg. So this amazing project that I was part of, this research on open education resources for development project, consists of a number of different projects. And I was the sub-project leader on this project that looked at lecturer's adoption of OER. And by adoption we mean contribution and use of OER. And I did this work with my colleague Henry Trotter, who would be here today if he could, but he is in fact traveling. So this is the project that I'd like to talk about. Just to give you a general sense of the enormous scope of this project, you can see how many different countries were involved, around about 100 different researchers looking at impact and use of OER, and very specifically in the global south. So we wanted to give a global south perspective on OER use and impact, and we felt that this was something that was missing in the literature, and wanted to actually get a better understanding of what's happening across all these different countries. So an amazing project to be part of. And my specific project with Henry, we were based locally here in South Africa. And we looked at three different institutions. So that's essentially what this project is about. We looked at our own institution, UCT, which is a residential institution, around about 26,000 students. Traditional research institution with a kind of collegial culture with academic freedom as paramount. And a copyright owner of teaching materials is the lecturers. And then we also went to the University of Fort Hare, which is more a rural institution, smaller, more of a bureaucratic environment, where a number of policies not always tightly implemented, but certainly lots of policies in place. And we also went to UNISA, a distance institution, very large, over 400,000 students. So if you're interested in this kind of comparison between institutions and different institutional cultures, we've written quite a lot around the role of institutional culture and OER adoption. But in a nutshell, so this is a little bit just about the methodology. So we interviewed academics at each institution. And the results I'm talking about here are the analysis of those interviews. But really in a nutshell, we were kind of, I don't know if it was disappointed, but the people that volunteered for the interviews, we only had two that were really using and contributing OER. And once we started to look at our data, we realized that there are a number of factors involved. And what we wanted to do was to come up with a framework so that we could compare the different institutions and the different factors that were barriers to OER adoption. And so we came up with this OER adoption permit, looking at these factors. And my colleague Henry came up with this particular diagram of OER adoption. And so as you're sitting listening to me now, perhaps you can think about your own institution and kind of go through these different factors and think whether these factors are in place. So in the Global South, right at the bottom of the triangle is the issue of access. This is not necessarily an issue more in the Global North where infrastructures are in place. But for us in the Global South, it is often a very big inhibitor of OER. Then this idea of permission. So this is the legal side. This is the policy side. At your institution, do you have copyright over your materials? So a very important aspect to consider. Then we found that awareness of OER is still a very big inhibitor. At the University of Fortair, very few of the academics who attended the workshops and who volunteered to be interviewed were aware of OER. Then we have this issue of capacity. So do you have the technical skills to be able to use and create and find OER? And then moving up the triangle, the idea of availability. Can you find OER in the area where you're interested in? Are they available? And then at the very top of the triangle, a very complex section around individual volition and agency. So if all these other factors are in place, do you have a personal sense of value around sharing and making your materials available? And there's a lot written, and my thesis is based in that top triangle. That was what I was trying to understand in my thesis. So hopefully this framework is something for you to consider, to have a look at in your own institution and in your own work. So if the factors are in place and you've decided you want to be an open education practitioner, you would like to go on this journey, then there are a number of factors to consider. I must say it's quite an interesting area at the moment in open education. At conferences I've attended recently, people are talking about this idea of open educational practices. So it's a little more than the OER adoption that I was talking about. It's more about really thinking about your practice as a teacher, as an educator, and opening up those practices. So I've just highlighted two different definitions, but there are many more definitions. And you might find one that you prefer. I would highly recommend, if you're interested in this area, to go and read the work of Catherine Cronin, who has this quite specific definition of open educational practices. And the link in the slide is to a paper that she's written that is very accessible and really an excellent overview of this topic of open educational practices. And then just below that, a definition by Martin Willow, which is really more loosely defined in a way, so that it opens up a whole realm of open practices that really he talks about a change in educational practice because of the open nature of the internet. So quite an interesting area and very much the talk at the moment in the open education world, becoming this open education practitioner. So then just this slide kind of talks a little bit about pedagogy, which is really the kind of basis of this idea of becoming an open education practitioner is thinking about changing your pedagogy, thinking about changing the way you're teaching. So you're no longer bound to your classroom and your students. Now you can actually open up your materials to the rest of the world, whether it's in blogging, it doesn't have to be contained in the traditional sense. And I'll talk about the ways of opening up in a while. But you might also be sitting there and thinking, oh, my materials and the way I teach, I don't think I have materials that are easily shareable. And that is a constraint. So there are constraints, and people are concerned about opening up their pedagogy. And there's a fine line between openness and privacy. And Catherine Cronin talks about this extensively, this idea of what you make open and what you keep private. And also in terms of use, sometimes it is difficult to find relevant OER. I mentioned that earlier in the availability aspect of the triangle. And then just onto my second last slide, just an example of how I've tried in my own way to be a little bit more of an open education practitioner or scholar, where the data for the rule for D study has been made openly available. So you can go and access my interview data and the questions. I'm trying to publish an open access journal so people can actually read about what I'm doing. In terms of open education resources, a good place to start is to simply share your slides and slide share with the Creative Commons license and actually extend your work out into the open. At UCT, we have open UCT, which is our repository. My thesis is there, available for anyone to read. And then I'm not a prolific Twitter user. But it is a very good way of communicating all these different forms of openness. And then onto my final slide. This slide was developed by my colleague, Sarah Goodyear, who has done a lot of work on open scholarship and teaches workshops on open scholarship. And I won't go into too much detail because of this time constraints, but it's kind of a nice process for maybe you to think of in your individual work, where you are, what your profile looks like online, how you could perhaps extend your outputs online, and how you can communicate what you're doing online. So just a kind of a step-by-step process of thinking about how you could move to be an open education practitioner or open scholar. And then this is my final slide, is just some links which you might find useful to the Royal 4D Work, to the Open Education Consortium site that has a phenomenal range of institutions with open materials available. To highlight the fact, the third link is the Year of Open. 2017 is the Year of Open. And this is a wonderful website that features a particular aspect of open each month, like open science, open pedagogy, open data, open education resources, very useful place to go and have a look at what's going on. And then if you are in Africa, OER Africa is a particularly useful website. So that's kind of all I want to say for now. I'd like to hand over to Greg. Thank you so much, Glenda. That was super interesting. I'll do all the presentation, the switching on and off of screens. But it's so interesting to hear you talk about the Open Education Practitioner and thinking, using Open as a way to think about your practice and these different spaces, but what you want to keep private and what you want to keep open and whether you want to adapt and maybe not share or maybe start the journey of creating and sharing your own OER. And Catherine Cronin's work is extremely interesting and I think that's what you said there. OK, right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I'll just make Greg a presenter. OK, can you hear me? Yes, and we're just seeing your screen now. Fantastic, open educational resources. Great, I shall mute myself. Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Glenda and Sally. So what I'm going to be talking about, as soon as I find out where the right button is, there we go. It's more focusing on what we've been doing regarding OER in the Faculty of Health Sciences at UCT. Obviously what I'm saying is in the context of the broad institution that institutionally, I think UCT is extremely open and there are lots of avenues and resources on the institution itself where you can get information regarding OER. UCT has been involved with the Cape Town Open Educator OER Declaration, the 2011 one. UCT has got a policy related to openness. We started a directory in 2010 that changed into a repository in 2014. We've got the library, we've got the IP office. So those are all the resources that we have available on campus when it comes to OER. So the process that we follow in the faculty and what I'll briefly speak about is how we raise awareness around OER, how do we find content to publish as OER, and what is the process that we go through in the faculty itself. I just need to add as well that I'm the e-learning manager in the faculty and we are a team of five staff members who support e-learning in general. So everything from lecture recording to video recording to our LMS and obviously also content creation and helping staff publish their OER. So if I talk about the first two aspects first, so those are some of the enabling factors that helps us that our culture at UCT is very much as I said open staff got the freedom to do almost anything and that's related to the fact that UCT assigns the copyright of all the teaching material that they create back to them. UCT retains the use of that material but then because the staff are the copyright owners, publishing them as OER, they don't have to jump through hoops or they don't have a lot of red tape that they've got to go through. Initially when we started this in 2008, our dean, the top right hand side, Marion Jacobs, was very supportive of OER and that helped, that we had top down support. Matuma Ramifi-Kang on the left hand side at the top is one of our OER creators and one of the champions in the faculty, the same as Johan Klopper at the bottom who won an open course here consortium, he's a surgeon, he's a professor in the faculty and we often hold those two up as examples when staff come to us and say I am too busy, I have too much to do, that I cannot do it, then we show them, you know what, there are others that have done it and that really helps us to, with our marketing of OER in the faculty and also to get others interested in creating their own OER. We also, when we go to do presentations in workshops, we tell people why they need to publish OER, so what is it in it for them? Because that is always the issue that comes up. We've had one academic who found that he wants to hold on to his teaching material, so that one day they can create a book out of it, so there are various reasons why people don't want to do it, but for the most of it staff in the faculty are pretty open to having their work published as OER and it's all about marketing, social responsiveness, fostering connections, future collaborations, when others can see what they are involved in, that students are able to have an idea of what the course entails because the course material is up for free. Then obviously we need to deal with the questions that academics ask and because we deal with different staff members and they often come to us for assistance, we're able to answer most of these questions because we find that most of them have the same questions, which really makes it easier for us because then we're able to help them think through what it is that they want to do and how do they want to do it. Obviously they come and ask who will pay for their time. We said we can't do that, I mean then you're on your own. If you're doing this for money then obviously you're doing this for the wrong reason, but when it comes to where do I find information, what software do I need, if they want to know if the material are being downloaded, then those are the kind of questions that we can help them The next step for us is clearing the copyright and packaging the content. We've got a staff member that's come to us, they've got material that they would like to create or publish as we are and what really helps us is that we've got one person that has got information about where to publish, what is the different licensing options, so they don't have to go and talk to one person instead of having to send them to the library or maybe to the intellectual property office. Most of the questions that they have we can answer right here. Somebody sits with them, asks them what do you want to do, let's look at some options. In the beginning in 2008 we had one person dedicated to OER, that's all that she did, but since 2012 the process changed and it's no longer person focusing on OER, but more focusing on helping staff create content and the fact that that content is published also in OER is almost a byproduct and that's what we're trying to cultivate in the faculty. Not OER is something separate, but it's what they do, it's part of what they do. So these are some of the things that we look at when we create OER, where we're going to publish, where we're going to host it, others able to find it, what kind of license do we put on there, is it freestanding, is it not, what are the copyright content, is there any copyright content in what you have already that needs to be cleared and that's probably the most time-consuming aspect of this, because what often happens is that academics will have images or other content in their teaching material for which they don't necessarily have copyright clearance for. So we will either try and get the copyright clearance for them or we will redraw it or find alternative images because most of the time it's related to images for them. What we also try and tell them is that it doesn't have to be perfect because it's surprising how often academics don't want to let go, don't think that their work is good enough to go out there into the wide, wide world, but I'll speak about quality assurance just now, but we keep on telling them, it doesn't have to be perfect. Our approach to what we produce, we've done entire courses, but then also manuals, videos, presentations, what we try to do from outside is package it in a way that it's easily for others to download, but it's also easy, easy to find and to go through. As I said, the person that deals with it for us, they've got knowledge of the licenses and they are able to assist the lecture with what kind of license do they want, and most of the time we publish it, share like non-commercial and that's one that we and non-derivative probably most of the time. Now we've made a decision a long time ago to have most of our material HTML based. In other words, even when the content is a series of PowerPoints or series of videos, we'll package it in such a way that it can easily access via the web. The advantage of that for us is it's easy to download it. So you zip it together in a zip file and somebody who doesn't want to view it online wants to download it, it's easy to do that. If it's HTML based, you don't need a special software to access it, and that is just one example that we've done. In fact, that is the one by Motumarofi Kim that I mentioned earlier on. Articulate storyline is another package that we use, but even when we use that simply because of some of the interactivity that it allows, we will still export it as an HTML file and publish it online as that. Now in terms of reviewing the OER and quality assurance, that as I said already, we're encouraging individual academics to upload their own material and to maintain it. We have just one person that deals with this, and that is just part of what they do. So if we can train others to do it themselves, then it means less work for her. But she's always available, or this person is always available to those who need assistance. What we've seen time and time is that if there is a dedicated body that staff members can go to for assistance, that really makes the process much smoother. It really encourages them to come forward to publish their materials OER because they know that somebody can help them through that. Most of the material that we publish as OER are teaching material. So the academics, the lecturers are using that in the actual teaching. So when it comes to quality assurance, we keep on reminding them that if it's good enough for them to use in their teaching, it's good enough to publish as OER. We don't have quality assurance per se, although the library does have a look at it in terms of copyright compliance. But most of the time the quality assurance lies with individual. In terms of publishing it and publicizing the OER, OpenUCT is our repository and that's where you'll find links to most of our material. We don't always use the OpenUCT as a repository We use it as a directory, although you can go there and you can have a look at the material. But we've stored material in our LMS, we stored it on YouTube, we stored it on SlideShare, we stored it in different places. For one reason, sometimes it's easier to have something on YouTube both in terms of accessibility, that we don't have to worry about that. Our learning management system also it is accessible and you're able to view it from a mobile device etc. So we don't have to worry about issues like that, because the platform on which the content is does it for us. People find the content various ways most of the time via Google, but also OER comments. In fact, for some of our academics, we publicized their content on OpenUCT and OER comments. That's the great advantage about OER is that you can put it in multiple places, copyright and copying it is not an issue. The one thing that we do encourage that some of our staff don't or a lot of staff don't take up is the whole reuse issue. That we encourage them not to reinvent the wheel. If it's out there already, why not make use of it instead of spending time on creating content from scratch. So these are some of the places that we go to find or search content for for staff members. And again, if the staff member doesn't have the time or the ability to do this, we will help them with this. You'll notice that LSHTM is there and in fact one of the courses that sadly spoke about early on the managing IK is being used in RPG and master's program on ophthalmology. Because the content that we're currently teaching at UCT is almost exactly what was published by Sally and her team. So it makes total sense to reuse the same material instead of creating material from scratch. Finding OER, there's various places, all of those are different sites that you can go to find OER and often the problem is that there's so many sites you don't know where to turn. And again, we have one person here that's got knowledge about most of that and our staff really, academics really find that useful. So in summary, I mean we do have challenges. So there's an awareness around OER, there's the sustainability issue, and the culture of not sharing is still a problem. And it is labor intensive that for some time we have to struggle with part-time staff, we train staff up, they leave, that means we need to retrain the new one again, and I don't think we're using students enough. At the same time, like I said, we have champions, we have top-down support, the awareness is growing, and we encourage lectures whenever we can, and we've got a UCT policy that really helps, and we've got this full-time expert that helps them. And we basically, we have created manuals and there are presentations to help staff to find OER. And that's it, thank you. Thank you so much Greg, that was super interesting as well. You guys do amazing work, and I'm always so impressed by what you achieve at UCT. I was so time-conscious during these webinars that I didn't introduce you Greg, for which I thoroughly apologize the Greg and his team have been working with us and partners to adapt OER with us, so working with Nia Oira and Michael in Kenya to adapt and Coexa to adapt the Global Blindness Course. We've learned so much from working with you Greg, just about the practicalities, remembering the offline use, keeping the HTML going, and so I just wanted to make sure that I acknowledge that in this webinar, so thank you. And also it's very interesting, thank you, not at all, thank you. And I was very interested in what you said about the institutional policy being a huge help. I think that is really key and that was something that Glenda talked about too, wasn't it? However, I shan't talk the questions, so we've had some questions come in. I'm just trying to unmute you Glenda, there we go. Hopefully you can unmute yourself Glenda, so I'm going to ask you both a couple of questions and then you can choose who can answer first. So we've had a couple of questions actually on evaluating the quality and you did talk about that Greg and you kind of leave it to the, at UCT you leave it to the educators to self-assess the quality largely. So the questions that have come in are, does teaching quality improve when using OERs? So it's a slightly different, so does do educators, when they start to use OERs, is your experience in research finding that they innovate with their teaching and improve the quality? And also what's the student's perception of the use of OER? Do they perceive it as good as sort of traditional, say, textbooks or materials? Or are there, have you come across concerns about the quality of the OER? Do you want to have a go at that first, Greg? Okay, I think the teaching quality does improve because now when we, when we let staff know, okay, if you publish this as an OER, it's going to go into the white, white world out there. Then yes, then suddenly we have concerns, oh, let me go back to that and to that and make it a little bit better or explain a little bit better. So I think, I think yes, but I don't think noticeably so, in the sense of the differences after staff is being aware of what it is it mean to be OER, isn't that great to have warranted their worrying, if I can put it that way. Because most of the, in fact, all the material that we publish as OER are being used in teaching at the moment and that we keep on trying to tell them it doesn't have to be perfect. In terms of students' perceptions of OER in fact, we did do a study in the one program and the students loved the OER because it was something they didn't have to pay for. It's something that was free. So they, yeah, so it was as good as the other material that was available. Yeah, and I think some studies in America are finding that too, aren't they? The college textbook studies and whether they're comparing the OER and the standard textbooks for courses there's no difference. No difference. Glenda, would you like to add anything to this question on evaluating the quality of the OER and student perceptions and does it help improve teaching? Are educators finding that it helps them improve their teaching practice? Yeah, so in my thesis I went into the issue of quality in quite a lot of detail actually and I did find for people who weren't contributing it was a very big barrier. So they were not contributing because they felt their materials were not of good enough quality and which is quite strange because generally they were brilliant lecturers and their materials actually were of good quality. So it kind of there was a I used a theoretical approach to kind of try and explain why some people are so concerned about quality which I won't go into now. So I do think it's there's almost a there's a real difference between a contributor and a non-contributor and most of my contributors were not worried about quality at all. They were happy to go ahead and use the materials and they were as good enough for students as Greg said they were good enough to be shared. So yeah, it's a very interesting area the area of quality and in terms of the idea about what students think I think the quality is related to use so if it's a good material it'll be used and that's the principle of openness is to put it out there and see what use actually occurs. Yeah, absolutely. I was just thinking I think I came across there's a link isn't there with being able to critically evaluate information feeling confident and skilled that you can assess the quality of any information isn't there so is it is it up to date? Can you see any mistakes in it? If you can see mistakes in it there'll be other mistakes and so there's a kind of a digital sort of capabilities aspect isn't there? Am I being really fluffy? Rather than having a sort of matrix or a rubric of things you have to check boxes you have to tick off it's about assessing each material as you as you encounter it. Yes, I agree and Greg had a list of kind of kind of aspects to consider around quality around usability and but yes I think it's about the person who's contributing and their view on quality and one way of thinking about it is the beauty of OER is that it can be updated and edited and can have versions it's not a fixed published item that cannot be edited and some of the most successful textbooks Greg didn't mention Johan Fagan but he's also a most incredible surgeon in health science and he shared his work in an open textbook and his philosophy is he's improving it all the time so that is the beauty of OER as opposed to a book that gets published in a particular version and is fixed so the strengths OER has those strengths in itself that need to be considered. Absolutely I'm going to we're kind of running out of time so I'm going to move on or the quality is super interesting so I have a question from Susan Evans about measuring impact of OER resources that has a complicated question Susan what feedback do you get from users at UCT and in your research and what types of resources do users find most beneficial is there any information on that or which kind of resources have better uptake evidence on that Greg? The feedback that we normally give to staff is around how many times have their resources been downloaded because those are the six that we're able to obtain and again this relates to the quality assurance issue because we tell staff members if others find it useful they will download it if they don't download it it means that they're not finding it useful but luckily we haven't come across that case when something has not been downloaded at all so that's one of the impact factors that we look at in terms of OER that has been published by staff in the faculty Yes I think that's good straightforward methodology method isn't it you're just like nobody's using it it's not useful Glenda do you have anything to add have you come across anything? Yeah I think there's also for some people this idea of who's using and how much it's being used is very important and I think in the OER world we understand this but yes as Greg said sometimes it's just about downloads and sometimes you could say in different countries but you can't get more specific than that but we often encourage academics to put contact details in their OER they're not going to be flooded with requests but we have very interesting stories where people have approached the academic and said oh I'm using your course in Saudi Arabia or I'm using your course here so there is that kind of informal feedback one of the aspects that's kind of in the future and I'm not quite sure how creative commons how far creative commons are with this but you know as you know all open education resources will have a creative commons license in it or on it and depending on how you embed that license you can also embed a URL with that license and what creative commons are trying to work at now is kind of a tracking system where you can actually get a little bit more information about how your resource is being used so this is technically clearly very challenging but I know that that is on their radar in the future so that's something to look forward to that's very interesting that would provide so much information at the moment they kind of go off into the ether and you may not hear from them again but I wanted to pick up what you were saying about sort of serendipity and new connections and that's something we have definitely experienced from our program of developing OER and courses when we started we just thought we would make a course and try and tell everyone that they could reuse it if they wanted to but it's led to many new partnerships and developments and reuses and so for instance we've moved on to try and translate the content and that is not something that was there at the start that came out of conversations that opportunity later on so that being open and then the networking and connections as part around the object itself is a very I think powerful part of it isn't it back to the OEP open educational practice you were talking about okay I think I need to wrap up and let everybody have their lunch or finish their afternoon I have one more question about the OER adoption pyramid can this is from Dachat can we use it to assess institutional and individual practitioners I think we were talking about the institutional use mostly in access and I'm sorry and I'm finishing the question in Africa where access is a huge concern Belinda do you have ideas and experiences on how this is being addressed within the African context so that's kind of two questions in one sorry so can the adoption pyramid be used institutionally and for individuals and do you know of approaches towards addressing this access issue in education yeah so we created the adoption pyramid to look at institutions but I think you know as I was talking about it definitely as an individual you could also consider whether you feel all those aspects are actually in place for you whether you want to move forward to be an open education practitioner so yes I think it could be used for an organization institution and on an individual level and in terms of approaches for accessibility I think Greg could probably also talk to this a little bit but I think there are lots of moves towards you know we do think that open education resources need to be online and increasingly we know that that's not realistic but there's absolutely no reason why an open education resource is not necessarily you know something that's printed out or that's available on a mobile device perhaps or something that for example there have been cases where materials have been downloaded onto a hard drive and then accessed at a rural school so they don't need the internet the materials are there and they can use them so people have experimented with a lot of different models to actually try and extend the use of OER into areas where there is no electricity or there is no internet so there are a number of models that have been explored so for example OER Africa have considered a number of these options in the work that they've done but yeah perhaps Greg could also talk he might have had some experience around making OER more accessible I mean the ones that Glen has talked about giving participants or those who use it the option so we present the content as an HTML file but then also there are the PDFs that we can download there's a zip file that they can download so it doesn't help to make it available only online and someone doesn't have internet connectivity to be able to access it or only have internet connectivity at various times and that is what we found in fact in our postgraduate programs where we have students from various other places in Africa one of the requirements is internet access and they say yes but once a week so they can make a plan but you need to make sure that you make it as easy as possible for them for the content of the OER to be mobile so to speak thank you thank you both I'm running over time so I'm going to wrap up but thank you again both those were two really interesting presentations I hope they have inspired our participants as well and I just want to finish off by thanking our funders without which our webinars and our programs would not be happening and if as a participant you're interested in our ICH open courses and in the OER and as a starting place maybe for your own practice here are a couple of here's our web address where you can register and also if you sign up to our email list that's where we announce new courses so if you're interested in the diabetic eye disease course later or the glaucoma or written off with the opportunity and so on that's the link there on our website so you can download this presentation from the handout section here for later and also from Glenda and Greg as well so that's it I'm going to stop waffling on and thank our presenters again I know they're very busy people so it's very kind of them to talk today and thank you to participating and take care goodbye thank you thank you Sally bye thank you