 Good morning everybody, or good afternoon, depending on where you are. This is Fabio Nascimbeni from the Eden Executive Committee and I'm glad to welcome you to the third webinar organized by Eden in the frame of the Open Education Week 2018. It's becoming a tradition for Eden to organize online events in the frame of the OE Week and today we are going to talk about grassroots educators. So we have with us four examples for real flesh and blood educators who define themselves with different degrees as open educators and this is exactly the logic of the day. To hear from their voices what it means to be open educators in their daily practice, what they do and what their institution is doing, what are the main challenges they have to overcome, what are their ideas also for other educators that would like to explore and experiment with open practices and open educational resources. So thank you very much to Michaela, Carmen, Anna Maria and Dwayne. I will not really introduce themselves, just give them the word. Just a couple of housekeeping notes for the audience. If you have any questions, please or comment, please use the chat. So that we can then pick them up with the speakers. And please note that every speaker will have some 15 minutes for his or her presentation and leave in some space within these 15 minutes for some questions or discussions so that we keep at the end some 20 minutes for a joint discussion. And the objective of this joint discussion is to do actually something that is being done continuously in the Open Education World. So to try to understand what could be done by educators in order to open up their practices. But the idea of this webinar is really to try to distill these ideas and these recommendations from the voices and from the ideas of grassroots educators. That is the title of this webinar. And of course with the participants, the webinar will be recorded, is being recorded and will be available in the Eden website. So in case some colleagues of yours cannot attend now, please let them know that the webinar will be available. Okay, we start with the first presentation. Let me put it on. So I'm now happy to welcome Mihaela Baneck-Zorica, I don't know the pronunciation, associate professor from the University of Zagreb. And actually I would say an interesting example of what it means to integrate openness within teaching in a very grassroots way. So let's hear from Mihaela about her experience. Mihaela. Give me a second, okay. You can all hear me and see me. Hello from Croatia. Fabio, you're right. Actually without K, so it's Zorica, but anyhow. Okay. Not now. We can hear you, but we cannot. No. Starts here, just a second, okay. Can you see me now? I can, yes. Go ahead. First, well, 15 minutes is very short and I'm going to try to be very brief. First let me tell you, when first I was asked to do this presentation, I was thinking, oh, 15 minutes to present what I do. Am I really an open educator or not? So I did a lot of questioning myself and then I realized I'm going to organize this talk as a walk. Mihaela, okay. But I was thinking, I like to play games. So this could be a short walkthrough. You know, like when you play a game and you don't know how to go to the next level, what you need to do, you go online and look at the walkthrough. So this was intended more as a walkthrough how to pass certain steps and how to pass certain levels. So when I say, am I an open educator? Why I question myself? It's not actually maybe my first choice. It's not something that I maybe wanted to do from the start, but was more forced to do. So the Cape in Croatia students actually are supported by government, the ones that enroll into faculty. The majority of them actually don't have to pay tuition fee. What my faculty, we try to do is offer them all the resources in our library. So we don't expect them to buy textbooks. So from the very beginning, we could say that we try to be open. We try to use what government already funds and to give that back to our students. What I say, I have problems with this and why I was maybe forced to be an open educator is I can't expect my students to pay for software, to pay for something else additional to the tuition fee. So I didn't have any resources, any funds, but I wanted to modernize my education. So luckily with the emergence of social networks and social web, I started using open resources that were already available, that were already out there, using academic social networks to guide my students to go and try to look for authors on ResearchGate, on academia, and to see their papers are published online so that they can use them for your charge. Of course, my faculty also buys large databases so they could access literature via a library, but I always sort of push them forward to explore and find open resources. So what I did just as short as you can see, I used videos to enable Philips classroom. I tried to push them into collaboration, not only in the LMS. First I started with Wikis, and then I wanted them to more reflect on their research process. So I used either Twitter for micro blogging or they were creating their own blogs. And then with networks like Tumblr, they were able to create their own blog networks and then they could communicate and share. Of course, during periods of second life, we also went there and tried to modify the existing sources. So they would either program the objects to suit their needs or they would create new objects that could be reused and modified. So what I'm guiding myself through is the five hours of David Wiley. So nowadays I'm pushing my students to build e-courses or at least parts of e-courses by using existing materials and then modifying them and remixing them. So again, I just wanted to tell you, I've given you my background, I've given you the info about funding in education in Croatia. So what still I'm having problems with is that these all initiatives are teachers' initiatives. So in general, there is a support on paper, but in practice maybe not so much. So I use this side sort of to reflect what current situation is in Croatia. So we have open access and we have open data, and this is what everyone is actually working on, and all the documents and all initiatives are going that way. But with open education, this coming soon used to reflect what we unfortunately have in here. So I've used, just to show you, I've used compared to repositories. One of them is Dava, which is the Creation Digital Academic Repository, which is a good initiative. But majority of the items that are deposited there are textual. There are either thesis or graduate thesis. There are papers, but what I'm lacking is any proper educational materials, like for instance, tests, which our teachers build and update and have great databases, which they are not sharing with anyone. Not that they don't want to, but simply they don't know how. They need something, some incitement to do that. On the other hand, I just took just one library. It was picked by a random University of Texas, where I've seen a lot of resources, so either finding or remixing or creating open educational resources. So this is the thing that I feel is currently lacking in Croatia, and this is something that I would like people to work more on it. Because all of the things that I was telling you about, what I feel they're not real open resources, because people say when they publish papers, they're full pen sources. All of these sources are actually gated. The materials are on this social network site, so you have to log in. They're actually not free. Although I'm using them in the context of open education, but also I feel that they're not really open, and they are somewhere else. The only thing that is open, and that we have are the LMSs, which are open source platforms. So I try to keep this short. Maybe I've gone through it too fast, but what I feel that we are lacking in Croatia is more collaboration on open educational resources, which we all are not sharing that much. Okay, thank you. This was a really fast, maybe too fast. This was perfect, Michaela, because it leaves us sometimes for questions. In fact, we have already a couple of questions by Wayne, inviting the others also to put their questions in the chat. So the first question by Wayne has to do with personal data, and the question goes like this. How do your colleagues feel about requiring learners to sacrifice giving up personal data by requiring use of proprietary offshore services? So are they aware? Is it a problem for them that by using proprietary solutions, they are giving away the data? Unfortunately, I mean, they are aware of it. This is a sacrifice that they're accepting to do. Both colleagues and students, because there is no other solution. So we are aware of it. But on the other hand, we are forced. Otherwise, you will not use it. What happened when we used the things that are in our LMS, students were not that much interested in this. They would rather use social networks, and I think they're actually not aware of the sacrifice that they are doing. We are constantly informing them and saying this to them, but they're saying, okay, I can pay only with my data because I can't afford to pay with money. So this is the unfortunate thing, but it's reality. I'm sure that Wayne has some ideas on this. Maybe Wayne, we keep this for your intervention if you want to say something about how to get over this issue. Well, in fact, it is already something that people, that your fellow teachers are aware of this, because awareness is normally the first thing. Many people don't care because they don't know about it or don't really know what that means, so it feels good. But once you are aware of that, I think some solutions can be found, at least to partially overcome this issue. But I'm asking Wayne to keep this idea warmer for later on when I'm going to give him the word. I have another question. This is a very, in my understanding, very critical one, again by Wayne. If a course requires password access, can we say it is open? What's your view, Moëlla? No, I agree completely with Wayne, and that's why my first sentence, am I open or am I not open? In general, maybe one or two courses are open. To have a policy that everything is open without a credential, so without a login and password, I don't think so. So that's why my reservation, I try to be as open as possible, but I'm seeing the large initiatives and what open is. In order to be such, I need to get support from my institutions, which I don't get. So I get support for LMS, but not the support to have a completely open course. I think already asking yourself if you are an open educator and let's say see how to move along this in the future is a pretty important point. Lisa Marie, if you don't mind, I would like to keep your question for the final debate because actually that is the, I would say the most critical question, how to move from paper to practice. So how can convinced open educators actually advocate for a system to change? That's for the final discussion. And then we have a comment by Aleister saying that in Sweden there is still a general resistance to OER, still only at enthusiast level in universities, and he suspects the situation is similar in many more countries. What's your view from Croatia? Michaela. What's this? We are currently just making people aware of the open access to the materials, which is a great initiative currently in Croatia. And as I'm telling you, it's just with the papers, with the open access and the open data, while the education, with the educational resources, they are still in the back. I expect that they will be the next phase. But for now, the resistance is still with the papers, with the publishing, and teachers still need to be educated on this side. And then afterwards comes the open education, as open educational resources. And when you talk to the teachers, they would like to share. They think that they have valuable resources and they would like to share resources and update their resources, but they don't know how. Actually, they don't know how. Okay, yes. They're telling me there is some echo. I will try to find a different mic. Okay, I have a last question for you. Apart from the, there is a statement by Aleister that open access has become accepted, but OER not, which is, I think, difficult to disagree with. It is also a matter of, I think, cycle. So yes, open access is possibly, I would say, easier to be adopted in technical terms. But still, this is a different discussion. I have a point, a question by Cintia. She says, she thinks teaching practice, I would say open teaching practice, would need more recognition. What's your view on this? With the distance education, so e-learning, when we started, it was just a couple of us. You can number us by hand that were going into e-learning and working with e-learning. And then only after it was recognized by the university. We created, the university created the award system. So everyone else wanted to join. I think the similar thing is with open education. We need more support. Currently, there is not that much support. I'm telling you, the support is focused only on open access. And it's slowly heading towards open educational resources. But to have a platform where we can share resources, where we can find and modify resources, currently no. I'm speaking about the university level. There are now initiatives for the primary and secondary school. There is a repository built, and teachers can share their materials. So on a lower educational scale, there are some initiatives going on. But for the university level, higher education level, we still need that. Thank you very much. Michaela, a virtual clap for you. Not only for your presentation, but for the work you are doing. We will now move to the next speaker for the final discussion. In the meantime, a dialogue is going on in the chat between Alistair, Wayne, and others, which is exactly what should happen. So please follow that there. And I'm now inviting Carmen to take the mic and the floor and the screen, I would say. Let me get her presentation. Hello, everyone. Glad to be here with you. Yes, please. Can you hear me, please? We can hear you, but not... So, Carmen, can we also see you? Okay. Yes, I think you can see me now. Glad to be here with you. I'm Carmen Halotas, a professor of computer science from Jonslavic University of the Visoara Romania. And I would like to share with you a few ideas about the practices in my universities, about the practices I use with my students, and then to provide you a few links towards the available initiatives in my country. First of all, the project, I suppose a lot of us know about this open edu, which published a lot of available studies and frameworks, and of course will be a useful reference for our work and research. Then I'm very happy that I can meet you a very available researcher. Here I have a paper of Fabio, you can see. It's very work. I put a lot of notes on your paper in search for the open educator. I started to study it a few months ago. Very good work. Okay, now let's see about some practices in my university. We try to continuously improve the blended courses. We offer to our students to integrate open educational resources and MOOCs. Together with a few of my colleagues we recognize some practical work of our students in external MOOCs if they participate in such MOOCs. Then we have practices for integrating MOOCs in our own courses, and I present you a few things about this. Then we kindly recommend our teachers to follow at least two MOOCs each year, one related to new technologies in education, two practices related to open education, and one related to their topics of research and of teaching. We have a very active community of practice for teachers. Then we try to be active participants in the Romanian Coalition for Open Education Resources to participate in organizing conferences and workshops on open education, and we are piloting now a project to issue digital certificates on the blockchain for our students. This will be the first university with such a practice in Romania. Okay, I will answer to the question. Thank you, Wayne, a little later. Then let's see how I blend MOOCs in my courses. A practice I started four or five years ago. There are a few variants to blend massive open online courses in a university course. You can direct, you can guide, you can facilitate for your students to use parts of quality MOOCs as the open educational resources to enlarge the content of your course with parts of the MOOC. Or your students can be part of the global communities of these massive courses and to participate also in the exercises, projects, forums, discussion forums of the massive open online courses. This practice I used with my students for the courses I teach, multimedia, object-oriented programming, and starting with this year a course related to blockchain development, again the first such university course in my country. Which are the aims for such a practice? This way students are allowed to become familiar with massive open online courses. They will be able to search and to evaluate useful and quality massive open online courses. They enlarge their knowledge about the topics of the course this way. They will become continuously learners for their whole life this way. And they will be able to have a critical evaluation for the usefulness of the MOOCs for their personal development. Which are the steps for MOOCs integration? First of all having the guidance from the teacher they discover and select the MOOCs in which to participate. Starting from a description for the MOOCs and from a few useful directories for massive open online courses. They participate in a part of the MOOCs depending on the topic of the course. They will present their learning experience as a digital story this way. Their colleagues their peers will be able to be part of the learning experience and then they will evaluate their participation. I put on the following slide possible activities in the blended course and also the benefit. I will not insist on this. Those who are interested will be able to find this on the registration of the meeting. Very briefly for the student the benefit will be that they will be able to assess their own learning needs. They will be exposed to high quality materials created with top educational technologies by top universities in the world. Then they will be able to collaborate in global learning communities and this way to grow their range of experiences. For teachers they will obtain new skills but their task will be more complex because the design and the management of the course will become more complex. It's in a way difficult but challenging to evaluate the distributed and collaborative activities of your student to facilitate the local learning community and to integrate it in the global community of learners. But this way as a teacher you can improve your knowledge in your own area but also related to open educational practices. And you will become more open you will become a real open educator and you can be a starting point you can be an inspiration for your colleague. Your colleague sorry. Here there are a few links that will guide you to available initiatives in Romania related to open educational resources. A recent international article just found that Romania is the first most productive country in studies related to open educational resources. And of course I hope to have to continue our communication not only during this webinar but in the following days and months you can find here my Twitter account also the link to my research and I'm very happy to be with you and of course I will try to answer the question you put in the chat area. Okay thank you. Thank you very much Carmen. A very I would say complete description of how MOOCs can be integrated into curriculum. I'm picking up a couple of questions for you whilst others are still typing so please don't be shy with the questions. So the first question is to do with the perceptions of students. Basically Wayne is asking that we're saying that one reaction a typical reaction about integrating MOOCs into campus program is that students can say I'm here to study at your university not another university. Are you trying to cut costs by using someone else's course? Did you get sometimes the feeling that this is a concern of students that you thought in the head of students? No I never received such an opinion from my students they were very happy to find this new way to learn and I could find that after integrating MOOCs in my courses for other courses in university they started to follow MOOCs related to those topics in order to improve their knowledge even if the teachers who teach those courses didn't recognize the participation in MOOCs they follow massive open online courses for improving their knowledge. This is a comment that can be received but of course as I was writing in the chat it's balanced by a number of other issues like innovation or perception of innovation or even prestige. Another interesting comment possibly a barrier by Alistair he said that the major problem for teachers that want to embed MOOCs into their teaching is to get access to potential MOOCs because you can only access them as a registered student during the course period how did you experience this problem how did you go about it? Of course MOOCs started in 2008 by being free courses then many platforms started to have guided MOOCs in nano degrees or specialties and so on and you have to pay for a few of them but many platforms offer free courses and also you can find MOOCs in which you can enter at every moment you can use them in a carousel way not only during a few weeks in which those MOOCs will be open so we try to find only free solutions for the students. Ok, thank you very much, yes actually this seems to be a problematic point for many teachers what we are starting to research this is also an invitation for others if you are interested in joining this mini movement is if an educational exception like the copyright exception but an educational exception for MOOCs could be put forward actually let's say when MOOCs are used or could be used by educators not by self-directed learners they could be treated differently in terms of license and in terms of openness in terms of duration so this is an interesting concept actually it's another level of closeness sort of of MOOCs actually another comment I had to do with the fact that MOOCs are not really ojar most of them so you cannot modify them you have to take them as they come and you never had this problem no, wanted to modify something in the MOOC but of course then you cannot do it how do you go about it when you find something that you would like to modify or to adapt Ok, maybe I was not very clear those MOOCs are used as additional resources for the course so right, central content for the course and then this content is enlarged with the contents of the MOOCs so the students are not guided only towards the MOOCs ok so I open my course towards the MOOCs towards different experts different social media platforms so MOOCs are only a part ok, so they can stay as they are because they complement I understand very well ok, a last question for you, you mentioned and this side you didn't know, congratulations that you are the first university in Romania that is offering blockchain certificates to say it in a word in this case you offer a blockchain qualify for formal academic credit towards degree at your university in this phase they will be only additional certificates because it's a pilot project and of course it will take some time to have an official recognition but we can we want to have this pilot project in order to be able to come with some recommendations for our Ministry of Education but of course you have to start from piloting also very interesting development, thank you very much it's sort of opening up somehow the certification process and technical terms ok, thank you very much, I'm asking you also of course until the end for the final debate you have a couple of points that will bring up later yes, you also are getting some congratulations through the chat I'm now inviting a virtual clap for you also Carmen I'm inviting now Anna Maria Tamaro from Parma University who will let us know about another MOOC related activity I would say has been pretty successful, it is actually quite successful and it deals with digital libraries Anna Maria has a very broad and long experience in trying to integrate technologies and openness into education, we wrote together a couple of papers on open education and where you are in Italy so I see some questions about the general situations in the country so Anna Maria can you share your information briefly some points on Italy I think that will be interesting but apart from your personal experience I will shut up now and leave you the word so we test first about this very innovative pedagogy of open education and so I prepare the presentation about the MOOC experience but I have a long experience of as a teacher I'm teaching at the moment in DIL DIL stay for digital library learning it's a joint course with Oslo and Tallinn and Parma and we have distance students spread in the world but I think that the MOOC was going deaf for me in the innovation of open pedagogy just to reply to the suggestion of Fabio about the situation in Italy it's exactly what you have already said similar to Romania similar to Croatia I think that there are innovators I think to be one of these there are teachers less enthusiastic of using openness tools and other approach philosophical approach but the policy and the government and the institutional support is very welcome but I'm sure it will change and so just to start with my presentation and we can come back to see the point of the situation in Italy my motivation was exactly to try an innovative approach to facilitate the learning there are many challenges for the teacher first my idea to put the learners into the digital library as evidence that there are some obstacles but also I focus on key drivers and I could evaluate doing the research for the participants in some key drivers we can consider and then I wish with you my reflection and also what I think to do differently I think it has been delivered starting from 2016 and we plan to reopen now this year in June and then in September I don't see any more my presentation sorry my philosophy my philosophy related to my topic information science is my discipline and the digital library is the subject I teach and unfortunately it's a very controversial subject there are two approaches one centered on collection you build the collection then the user will come the second is instead centered on user this is my motivation the user into the digital library not the customization not the personalization of the interface but really try experiment I can engage participant and to be active in the digital library my idea my philosophy is that the digital library is immersive should be integrated into the lives of people and so I am very ambitious I know in part the MOOC has given some result in this sense the MOOC participant we are in total 1213 and I wanted not to have only student I wanted to have teachers and this is why most of the participants 65% were teachers teachers of all levels of school from elementary school primary school to high school we have had a law for the school in 2017 and this has facilitated 2016 and this has facilitated the active participation of many teachers and also a new profile for example facilitators of continuing development also we call digital facilitated digital technology application in teaching only 15% were professionals in the digital library sector and so a very heterogeneous mass of participants with very different background this was really a challenge also pedagogy is very important and also very demanding the innovators the teachers who wanted to use open pedagogy should be aware that there are two pedagogical approach especially in traditional teaching also not using technology the traditional approach to teaching is to think that the person you have in front probably the student don't know anyway don't know anything is completely unaware of a topic and so the teaching is information centered based on transmission information instead in the lifelong framework lifelong learning framework and adult education with this MOOC participant the importance is to be learning centered and this is really a big change of perspective in teaching I started first to analyze the context of the participant they have filled the questionnaire and also I asked to allow them to do a presentation I think that in this open pedagogy the most important thing is the support of the platform this was my experience I have used a MA platform this is a very open platform and is supporting the teacher in the full cycle of the course from the creation to the certification and so really all the activities to be done are supported by this platform I have used many platforms my teaching experience really I think that this is the first platform I found including all the activities to be done and for example I appreciate very much, I will say more stimulating the conversation there is possibility of blog, forum there is possibility of student creative participant I can say creating content and so on and so my idea of digital library I already explained to you is very different from stereotype digital library has put book online is not only digital resource is a virtual space is a learning space and can be also immersive in embedded the life of participant and so can be for example laboratory in the class anyway there was a first satisfaction survey done by Ipsos unfortunately not many participants reply to this questionnaire and so the result are based only on 6% of the participant which consider the 1000 of participant is anyway not very few and you see in the strong green there was a good satisfaction range in general 60% and then all the lessons were ranked with different satisfaction but this satisfaction survey was not satisfactory for me and I wanted to do more and so I asked one of the master student to do a thesis investigating more what were the key drivers for improving learning in the perception of the user the student was Karla Columbati and she approached the topic from the user experience point of view and so considering on the element of the MOOC and and this is interesting just a panorama of the key drivers and then you see that what was considered the important for learning is in the center is sharing and then interaction and then discussion sharing the discussion is related to the community of participants so community of learners interaction is related to the teacher PR assessment is related to the community too going to explain better community sharing is really related to the possibility the student the participant in the MOOC have to create content for each unit I just started to put the underline in the video but especially in the description the main point but doing question and then there was the discussion by the student very animated discussion very populated and at the end it was a synthesis and so this was what we experimented together with co-teaching for many unit I have involved in the conversation but also in the responsibility of doing part of the content the student of the alumni of the master deal this was very interesting for broadening the participant I forgot to say that the MOOC is in free language Italian, English and Spanish but the student from the student come from different area too there was one student also from New Zealand and from Spain and so on and this was a large in the community of people interested in digital library and so co-creation you see is very well considered and the first the first element considered good for improving the learning by people are exactly co-creation and then interaction interaction is a point I will reflect later is very demanding for the teachers I try to post every day one blog post and also I prepare a weekly newsletter synthesizing the course for that week there were also two in-out session and in the middle at the end before the final submission of the assignment anyway interaction is important for the participant but they would like more PR assessment was a learning experience too and so the participant were collaborating in finding the indicators to assess the assignment and then giving feedback to their peer and this was very well considered by most of the respondents and finalizing my presentation what I would like to do differently I know now that to be an innovator means to perform multiple roles not only teaching but to design to mentoring to market and also is a very risky exercise because there is a lot of visibility and there are some obstacles which were underlined by participant time constraint and also related more to my work that I was more demanding than their background and this is why I have to learn more and that I have to know the background start from different level and there is still technology difficulty also there are so many platform so many possibilities now and I think that we have to do research usually research and teaching are considered two different parts of the academic world but we need really combine information and learning and this is what we plan to do in the next two years but also from the pedagogy further research and assessment feedback is needed just to conclude I think that the idea to have an international community to share our teaching experience is very important to reinforce best practice but also to discuss with doing research in controversial issue and I think I can stop I hope to have been in the limit of the time and I look for your question and to say more thank you so much thank you very much and Maria actually I mean I agree with you taking your last point that we need an international community actually we have Eden that is doing this pretty well and this year the Eden yearly conference is taking place in Genova in Italy so it will be an occasion to try to get as many Italian online and open educators together in mid June so if you have not registered yet I advise you to do so it's going to be an unforgettable event and thank you very much and limit I would just take a couple of minutes to three minutes for questions and not to leave not to eat all the time for the final commenting I think let me say you here let me see the questions yes Lisa Marie is confirming is agreeing that we need more reflective practitioners so the fact that the researchers and the teacher and the researcher should actually coincide and work together sometimes also in the very same person I have a question myself while others are reading actually you say that in doing in order to do what you have been doing a teacher must transform himself or herself into a strange animal that is at the same time a teacher a mentor an expert an animator a facilitator and I think this is probably the biggest obstacle for teachers to take up this I mean it's not some not only the at least in Italy but I think many other countries in Europe especially young teachers in the ten years have not a lot of time they are forced to publish more than any human being could do so they even if they want to experiment with open strategies as you say this takes time and takes time also to learn that to transform do you see some options some possibilities to break this visual circle of not enough time not enough incentives and so at the end of the day a static system do you see some way out this is I think a very crucial point we spoke before of rewarding I can say don't expect rewarding recognition by the university this is valid for young career people but also for older one older one really the only reward I consider is the feeling the participation the interaction with students so a real educator is rewarded by the feedback of the student and from the good human relation started also in this distant technology pedagogy way at the moment I hope you will change we are in transition generation and I am sure the university has to change have to change and so our experience can be useful for the next step I think the only rewarding we can consider is this human relation also mediated by computer and I don't expect to have anything else this is true is much more demanding than teaching in a class not only for the number but because really you have so many multiple roles in one time exactly we have a comment there saying that sometimes technology makes students life easier but not teachers life good point last quick question do the teachers in your environment get an official recognition in university for using open educational practices and dispensing under the radar no it's under it's not considered at all I have another very I have another suggestion I do a question to myself speaking of the change in the university I was considering doing this experience but do we need administration still or we can think of an educators without the university what the university add to what is my work and what add to the platform having a platform like Emma doing everything but why do I need the university and this is a question I have no answer this is a question why it's an interesting one but we should keep it for future discussion I think what is really true is that the more the role of educators change also the role of others around the educators should change the idea of an learning center doing everything for example when the educator just teaching is a really an old one and in some cases still the people in the famous center don't want to leave some space for others to experiment so in a change perspective it's not an naive question it's an important one I think a lifelong learning approach is doing the change is driving the change exactly thank you very much Anna Maria virtual club for you also over to the only main presenter which one day before women's day is quite good Wayne McIntosh from New Zealand I'm getting your presentation online see you there Wayne thank you for being with us what time is it Cheyuu good day everyone it's still a respectable hour it's 9 minutes off to 10 in the evening 10pm so I've seen the future that's already happened you're all going to have a wonderful Wednesday and let me wish you a happy open education week it's great to be able to join you across the ocean so to speak and I guess I'm going to have to do a little bit of defense as to why a Kiwi from New Zealand can gate crash a European congregation celebrating open education week but hopefully I'll be able to legitimize myself and so what I hope to do is briefly give a bit of context around what we're doing with the OERU and then just reflect on some of our open practices so thanks for the opportunity so I mean I think one of the I need to start off that the OERU international collaboration which has some 30 partners from five continents around the world is first and foremost a charitable collaboration that is really trying to address a key challenge we are facing in tertiary education we know that conservatively estimated that over the next two decades we're going to have to provide an additional 100 million places to provide access to tertiary education and the majority of these learners that are qualified for seats in tertiary education will not be able to have the funding to afford the privilege of a tertiary education and this is the key challenge that we are trying to address at the OERU I think a little for example what if institutions were to assemble just two courses based entirely on open educational resources that learners could access at no cost and what if those institutions agreed to provide assessment services for formal academic credit and that is essentially what we're doing here at the OERU so just very briefly how the OERU works we assemble courses based entirely on open access and OERU and being OERU we are able to provide these courses that are designed for independent study at no cost to all our learners our participating partners provide assessment services on a fee-for-service basis to enter transcript credit towards recognised degrees within our partner network we made good progress we are launching in 2018 the OERU first year of study to two exit qualifications the one is a certificate of high education in business that will be conferred by the University of the Highlands and Islands based in Scotland which I think is one of the reasons that can legitimate my contribution to the European conversation in that we will have a European based qualification within OERU and you can see the list of courses that have been assembled as open online courses the other exit qualification we will be including in the first year of study is a certificate of general studies also a first year qualification that will be conferred by Thompson Rivers University and you can see there the list of courses we have that are really available as open online courses that will be assessed by our partners for transfer credit that will be respected exit qualifications one of the things we did early in the OERU design process is we assembled all our courses as micro courses in part to address the difference in sizes of courses in different regions of the world so for example a typical course in North America Canada and the United States is typically 120 national learning hours where a course in New Zealand is typically 150 national learning hours in the UK for example most modules are 200 national learning hours and so one of the things that we did is we assembled all our OERU courses as micro courses equating to roughly 40 national learning hours and using the micro course model we are able to establish a currency transfer if you will with the differences in course sizes so four micro courses would equate to a full course here in New Zealand and Australia three micro courses would equate to a full course in North America and typically five micro courses would equate to a model by module in the UK environment but you'll see the exciting potential we have with micro courses is the ability to issue micro credentials and in fact we are launching a micro credential initiative through an initiative called EduBirds that has been spearheaded by one of our partners at Targo Polytechnic and you get the idea a course like introduction to management in this case is splitting to four micro courses and learners can be assessed individually for each of those micro courses and earn the micro credentials and if the learners successfully achieve the set of micro credentials they will earn transcript credit towards the certificate of high education in business at the University of the Highlands and Islands thinking a little bit about open pedagogy I realise it's quite a new concept and it's still quite contested in the literature but I think one of the opportunities is to think about what can open do that closed can't one of the opportunities is around what we call free range learning or the pedagogy of discovery with the growing inventory of open access and OVR materials that are around the world it is possible to design courses where learners go out and find their own resources in pursuit of their own learning interests in achieving the learning outcomes for individual courses and we have integrated the pedagogy of discovery in a large number of the OVRU courses also one of the key features of the OVRU on the teaching side with regards to our delivery platform is we have designed our delivery model around teaching or learning on the internet as opposed to learning through a single application like a learning management system open technology at the OVRU is based entirely on open source technology a key principle for us at the OVRU is that no learner or educator should be required to sacrifice their freedoms in software choices by requiring them to purchase a software license so our entire development and delivery infrastructure is open source we author our courses collaboratively using Wiki technology we use the same Wiki technology that drives the Wikipedia website where our authors distributed around the world collaborate in assembling an outline of individual Wiki pages and we have open source technologies and scripts that are able to produce a snapshot of these collection of Wiki pages to a WordPress website and what that means is that any education institution in the world would be able to easily produce and remix any of our courses for hosting on an open source technology like WordPress looking at the delivery site from the learner's perspective they access our course materials from the WordPress site, the published site for us say a key principle or a key philosophical value is that learners must be able to access all course materials without requiring a password and so you will see you would be able to access any of our courses without requiring a password what we also then do is distribute our interaction technologies using a whole range of open source technologies for learners to interact with each other and we have technologies that are able to syndicate or harvest posts together in an aggregated course feed and there's been a lot to talk about the so called next generation learning systems the component based systems and this is just an example of the suite of open source technologies that we use to assemble personal learning environments for our learners our social media network is Mastodon which is an open source alternative to Twitter, learners can post their reflections and keep e-learning portfolios on blog sites that they control and maintain even after the course is finished we have an internal commenting engine called WikiNotes, it's all open source we of course integrate annotations using hypothesis we use a social bookmarking technology that is powered by Semantic Scuttle which is also open source similar to Dejo and we use the discourse discussion forum engine so you can see what happens is learners interact on a whole range of different open source technologies that we are able to integrate together in our course feed and this brings me to the key reflection or the key challenge that we have experienced in assembling these courses working with faculty and academics all around the world and I think it's the key challenge we're having to deal with is shifting from the notion of sharing to learn to learning to share most educators understand the value and are quite eager to share their outputs in order to support learning they understand the value of doing that however many academics actually don't know how to share effectively in open environments I mean consider for example comparing this to the free and open source software world any developer worth their salt when tackling a new software development the very first thing that they were going to do is to go out and see what open source software is already available to integrate whereas many of our educators tend not to go out and look first what OVR is available open access resources are available in order to remix we have a number of challenges that we have to deal with crossing this chasm I mean consider for example I don't want to be labored at this point but just by way of illustration if we are serious about inclusion in open education we should also make sure we enforce our learners and educators to sacrifice their freedoms consider for example I'm an open educator I do not use proprietary software by choice but in order to participate in this webinar I was forced to save my presentation in a proprietary file format I was forced to download proprietary software so that I could use the flash plugin that powers the back end of the Adobe Connect system so I mean these are challenges we need to think about in open education and our practices to what extent are we excluding people through the choices of technology we are using and I guess the key question we should be asking ourselves is it appropriate to be aiming to achieve open goals through closed technologies so let me just leave it there and hopefully there are a couple of questions that we can engage in some discussion but thank you for the opportunity to join you this evening and I look forward to any questions you may have Thank you very much Wayne I have to say that every time I hear your presentation I have something new to say so now you have your first year and these degrees real life degrees taken completely different approach actually why is the people I am asking my colleagues and participants to write in the chat their questions I have one question which is a fundamental question regarding your experience I would say you started from scratch with the new approach and with the new institution I would say new network a few years ago and it seems to work now most of the participants not only of this webinar but also of European and I would say global higher education are actually working in institutions that have from a few dozens to a few hundred years so these are let's say traditional institution as we have seen tend not to value innovation as we should tend not to care so much about corporate tariff just they have other issues let's say high management and governance so the thing is we heard today by three professors working into traditional universities and now you come and by listening to you really the answer comes to Anna Maria quest we should just scrap traditional universities and move to new models maybe that's the way but that is not actually possible we know that so what's your advice for giving your experience in your specific setting for teachers that are struggling sort of in traditional and sometimes resistant environment yeah a very important question Fabio and I don't think they are necessarily quick fixes or easy answers for us at the OERU I think why we have been successful is because we value the university as institution what the OERU network is aiming to do is we are not a disruptive innovation model that is trying to replace universities but rather we are an innovation model or an innovation partnership that is focused on widening access to education but at the same time saving the value of our conventional institutions if there's one thing that characterizes the OERU network it is the rigor of our planning and to be quite honest I don't think the university as institution is at risk it is one of a handful of institutions that survived the industrial revolution and I'm convinced that the university will be surviving the knowledge revolution but it is hard to innovate in higher education we are a traditionally very conservative environment and I think our conservatism has contributed to our success the way we have worked with the OERU is not to innovate on too many fronts at the same time but rather to take smooth steps and do what we can with what we have in a way that is going to contribute to more sustainable education not only for our learners but more sustainable and efficient practices at our institutions what the OERU network model enables us to do is to spread risk in ways that no one institution is exposing themselves to any major risk but collectively we are going to achieve more than we can do alone that's the key to success and at the same time an indication for traditional universities to take small steps actually another question that I can paraphrase from the chat has to do with your open educators different models with volunteering by using only open source software some of which actually like Mastodon in my opinion works better than proprietary software so it's not a matter of using second class stuff actually in many cases the level is the same but what about your teachers so your teachers are they come from the universities that are part of your network so at the end of the day they also have a traditional teaching life in my understanding so how do they transform like superheroes when they enter into the OERU mood is this do you see some sort of double identity there or is this also improving the way they teach in their traditional life our experience by and large has been with obviously different academics come to the table with different experiences different academics come to the table with different motivations around open education but one thing is for sure our model is a very incremental model we accept all the educators where they are and we work together as part of a learning process one step at a time and I can assure you the majority of educators that have been through an open design process build new skills and new capabilities that are able to plow back into mainstream education there are many there are many aspects in designing an open online course that are not the same as a traditional course I mean just designing materials full remix has a number of requirements that aren't immediately apparent if you don't come from that experience but the open source model is one of working collaboratively together learning together we have a model in the open source world which is called rough consensus and running code we in every course development we try and achieve a rough consensus in terms of what we're going to do over the next week and then we implement and it becomes a learning process and one of the key values for our partner institutions is by using our open source software stack they are introduced to new technologies that could save millions of dollars on campus and reintegrate those technologies in mainstream operations at campus and one of the things we do there we are you is we actually publish the technical recipes for using all of our software that anybody can take and reintegrate back into the institutions to make operations more sustainable okay thank you very much Wayne I think we have actually one minute left if you want to stay into the timing so I would like to invite everybody to visit the OERU.org website for the practical questions just one question by Lina are the OERU courses only in English or you tackle other languages a very good question at this stage our courses are only in English large because we are tackling a big complex problem and integrating multilingual teaching would have introduced a layer of complexity I think that would be hard to deal with but there is nothing to preclude anybody having conversations with us in terms of how one might take the screen words I mean we will share anything we have done with any language that wants to replicate what we have been doing okay great thank you very much so I would like now starting with you Wayne since I have you here on the screen to give to everyone of our four speakers for a one sentence or a couple of sentences and the main question would be I mean you are OERU educators let's say in different ways either you are integrating MOOCs either you are leading actually Wayne one of the most open networks in terms of or you are let's say I think all of you including Wayne you are struggling with the system because actually the system started by not being open because of a different time and a different context now the question is if you had the possibility to change one thing of the system so you go to really the minister of education the European commissioner or think of your rector or the conference of rectors of your institution and you think there could be one thing to be changed one thing they would say yes to by definition what would you ask them what would you tell them that is the most important thing to be done in order to I would say transform educators into open educators empower educators towards openness we have heard a number of things about institutional supports they call this network in recognition the lack of awareness but what would be your shot Wayne I think if there's one thing that we need to be doing at a global scale is returning to the core values of education and that is to share knowledge freely if we get that right everything else falls into place okay that's great one sentence that I will I will keep for the not only for the notes of this webinar but for many more Carmen can you jump in for a second my idea would be to be able to officially recognize the courses which have a blended approach because now we have to provide a lot of papers in order to to accredit a course to have a book to have a number of hours in the classroom and so on but the online activity is not officially recognized okay so officially recognized blended and online courses this would trigger a big change into the system thank you very much um Michaela can we have your shot an opportunity sorry I said just one sentence and just one issue I would go with a lot more of course financial support would be something that's very very necessary but I would go with formal support something in the direction that Carmen said and the support recognition of collaboration because what I'm hearing from Wayne would be actually a collaboration on a European level let's say in a way so we can create additional resources for European fields if you can understand what I'm saying okay thank you very much Anna Maria my first sentence is learner first I would like to start from learners and possible support in accreditation and recognition of learning stimulated using open educational resources and the university involved in further education I think this can be a simple uh rules with a big impact we need to educate a mass people I think there is some sort of agreement I would say or at least convergence among what are the most important things which is good at least these are missions almost impossible not completely impossible so I think we can start the day or end the day in the case of Wayne with some good feelings I would like to thank everybody sorry for being five minutes late but I think it was worth staying here a few minutes more and I'm inviting you to the next also to the next webinar organized by Eden in occasion education week which will be on Friday you can see the link in the chat to all to all our webinars and again to invite you if you can make it to our next conference in June in Geneva another occasion to keep on discussing these things also in person I would like to thank Anna Maria Carmel, Michaela and Wayne our four distinguished speakers and to wish everybody a good continuation of a fantastic open education week 2018 bye bye