 The next session is about the open med, open course. And we have three presenters, Fabio Nascimbeni, Daniel Villar Anrubia, and Adi Twisi, who will magically all speak within 15 minutes. Thank you. Thank you, Catherine. Well, we have decided to keep it a little bit more simple. So I'm going to be making a very brief introduction to the project. And then Adi's going to talk most of the time. Because this presentation in particular is about the perspective from facilitators. And he's the only facilitator here. And also Javier is with us. And she's an external evaluator. So if you have any other questions about evaluation, she will be also available to reply. So open med is an Erasmus-plus project as well. And it's about raising awareness and facilitating adoption of open educational practices in the South Mediterranean region. In particular, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Palestine. This is an overview about different things that we have been doing over the last three years. But today we are going to be focusing on the capacity-building course, which has been a core component, especially being an Erasmus-plus project, looking at capacity-building for higher education. So an overview of the course. It has five modules covering in total 80 hours of work. It has been translated into three languages. It has 12 facilitators and 62 participants from five countries. This is just our learning circles. We have learning circles in all the partner countries and also Lebanon. So in Lebanon, we had an extra learning circle. And if you want to just take the floor, Adi. This was our first facilitator of facilitators training last September in Torino. Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. So this picture was taken back in Torino. And as you can see, there's a lot of people here. Most of them are facilitators who joined that program in order to get introduced to the processes that's going to happen. And how are they going to present the course online to their learning circles? As we showed in the previous slide here, there were 12 facilitators in total and 62 learners differentiated and partitioned in different groups. We called them learning circles. And they are among the five countries as well. So we had in the course, as mentioned before, five modules. In each module, we plan to have webinars with people who have impact and open education in different countries. These are some of them. And we were humbled to have them in our webinars as well. So that our learning circle would understand and get more insight from the outside world and from people who lead organizations in this aspect. Now, here are some findings that I would like to share with you when we finished the course and presented the module. It lasted for about how much was that, six or seven months. And then once it was finished, we were running a summative and informative evaluation for the course. As we can see here, here's also a recap for how many facilitators and trainers we have in each country. As you can see that five of them have one facilitator against or versus the remaining of the trainees for the remaining, some countries chose to have two facilitators because some learners actually wanted to learn more about OER, although, though, they had the ability to teach online. So they were teachers and instructors at the same place. But they wanted to get more information and more hands-on experience on what OER are and try to make their own, actually. Other insights that I would like to share with you is that the impact was expandable, actually. It wasn't also just narrowed on focus on these universities. We had other partners, a room for other partners that I come from, for example, the Manor University in Egypt, Yarmouk in Jordan, Helwan University in Egypt as well, and in Morocco, University of Muhammad V and Rabat. So this is actually that shows that the impact was expandable as well. We wanted to reach as much as possible at the extent of our ability in this project. OK. And here I would like to share some quantitative and qualitative results with you from the evaluation. We see that in this evaluation of the open-bent course, we saw that the over quality of the course was made as good. Most of the people, the good represented by green color here, most of the learners and facilitators as well, thought that it was really good to have this platform in terms of navigation, the level of the students who participated, the learning circle, and value of the activities themselves inside. So as we can see here, that was mostly positive in terms of the experience that they had. Facilitators now talked about if they learn new techniques on how they can use in their teaching. And will they be using OER in the future? Take into consideration here that when we are talking about facilitators in the South Mediterranean region, not all of them were previously involved as open educators, I would say. I had to happen to be one of them. And I'll tell you my story in short. One of the things that I would focus in here, will you adopt the methodology of this course in your practice later on? The majority said yes. And this is actually a positive insight that you can get from this result. Now here's the qualitative part, which is something that I would like to focus on now. Myself, I've been involved in this project since day one in my university. I represent Princess Sumai University. I'm the director of the e-learning center. And my day one in Princess Sumai was the expert meeting of OpenMid there. Vice President came to me and said, hey, I'm going to introduce some people. Their work might be so interesting to you. So let me show you. He introduced me to Daniel. And Fabio was there. And afterwards, what is this all about? They said it's open education. Open education. Can you get education really open? Are you kidding me? So that's what was my mindset telling me, is that how can we make education really open? What is OER? I've never heard of it like a term OER since it was coined back by UNESCO's forum back in 2002 until now. And then I began to read more about it because I was about to evolve in this project. I wanted to learn more how to use OER and evolve in my courses and my techniques. And I found that there was a problem between applying OER and depending on the country itself. How am I doing at the time? OK. All right. Between the policies that are applied in my country, which is Jordan, and other countries in the region, and how to contrast them with the European Union in this project so that I can get benefit from everybody and share and exchange ideas. What I found is that the problem of OER in the closed education systems resides in the very definition of what OER is. OER openly or freely accessible, openly licensed. Again, freely accessible, openly licensed. When you are being open, you're moving this way. When you want to care about privacy and security of your stuff, you're going to move this way. So that's actually applied in every aspect of higher education in Jordan, that they really didn't grasp the idea of OER at the beginning. And I'm talking as a facilitator from one of these countries. I began to understand OER and the opportunity and the vistas of, I would say, cooperation that I can open with other universities and how expandable it is. So I'm really grateful for that. I'm going to go really quickly through these findings and focus on some of them. For example, Facilitator C, I don't know who that is, but I agree with them, to make more visual materials and improve the quality of the produced videos as one of the recommendations that they made to make the course more impactful and more reachable to everyone else. One of the notes that we got on the course of the OpenMed is that it has a lot of textual content, although though I've been involved also in designing the course, I've been there in the beginning, and we try to involve as much as we can from different multimedia and in order to make them understand how OER works, how to use them, reuse them, improve them, and implement them in other places, and also how to use the open licenses. So maybe it was depending on the type of learners in which region are you talking about. Some learners prefer to be more textual, others maybe more visual. There are some people in the middle hall in the mix, you know. Okay, and from the end-depth interviews, I can share many of the readings, readiness for OER adoption, and how to develop that and making the experts in open education appointed to influence positions like the director of e-learning centers in each university to be a reactor for OER and a promoter for their learning circle in the future. I would like to mention and reassure that this course was in a pilot phase. All of what I'm showing here is something to be more improved, is something to be translated into three languages, Arabic, it's basically in English, but it's going to be translated in Arabic and French. We're still working on that, but for sustainability, we are working on having several scenarios where this project is going. Two of most is, and I think that's gonna be linked with the main challenges of this project, is that we would like to have this course also implemented in each university or in each partner so that everybody would get benefit out of it and we are also having the idea and the possibility to also link it with other organizations and extracting it out to different LMS systems. Okay, so yeah, that was actually explained in my talking before. And the improvement and validation of this course is going to be continuously happening, but what I wanted to say here is that some countries, and I would relate with this with the title of the previous presentation, some countries are open in the education, but not open enough. Some other countries or other educational systems are really close. What I see from here, the real value is, is at least to introduce people to this concept. I mean, there's always a shocking factor, you know, you have to get to use it and see it and get out of your comfort zone and learn something new and keep moving forward. I see that's a big value in this one, learning a new paradigm, relatively a paradigm for myself and for many scholars in my country in order to get to it, learn something new and keep moving forward with it. I see there's a lot of potential in this one and thank you so much for listening. I really don't want to keep lab-lab-ling about many things here, but I would also save the last few minutes for any questions that we'd like to ask. Thank you. Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much, Adi. My apologies earlier, I didn't pass the microphone to the questioners, so I'm going to do that this time. And can I see if there are any questions from anyone? Yes. Yes. Do you have a mic? You do. Hello, thank you very much for this very interesting presentation. I would have a question about the learning circles. How did the interaction work between a facilitator and the learning circle then within the learning circle itself and then between the learning circles? Okay, good question. So there was an interaction between the learning circles, I would say. That was back in also to we in a week, we gathered them all together and they promised to keep on working together, maybe to present a project, a final project at the end of the course. We opened the door for everybody from different circles to talk to each other because that's what really it is about. We wanted to have this international sense in this project, but let me get inside each learning circle. It was a fully online technique and this is something that I can also relate in terms of the Jordanian regulations. For example, I can talk in behalf of my country. We have something weird that is called the blended learning. It's not really weird, it's weird in Jordan. They provided the ability to present the course, any course in any university with 25% as an online content. What about the other 75, the other percentage? Well, you can have them as face to face. Well, that would destroy the whole concept of what MOOC really is and there were also certain challenges that we faced in terms of the ability for learners to learn through online platforms. We use Sakai as an LMS and some students from our learning circles didn't have the technical ability yet enough to get involved in this course. There were some technical problems in some areas of Jordan in terms of internet connectivity and stuff, but we were able to overcome these challenges by addressing each of the learning circles problems before we started the pilot project so that the pilot went through very smoothly and I think that we've learned a lot even before we started the pilot project because we had to encounter some challenges that we waited long before we faced them and now with OpenMid, the time has come to face them and overcome them. Yeah, thank you so much for this question. Thank you. Any other questions? It's hard to see. I don't know, it's... Can I just know about one more question? Please, final comment, yeah. Do I need the mic? Just to complement something, but two interesting things about this course. First, it was developed and designed completely collaborative. So we met all the partners in Madrid for three days and it really worked hard starting from zero. So starting from designing one-by-one learning objectives and taking into account the situation in every single country. And it was, for sure, a learning experience for the South Mediterranean partner, but much more, probably for the Northern partners because we tend to consider ourselves experts in the course design and instructional design and there we had really to start from scratch because the situation is very different in every country. And then about the collaboration among the learning circles from different countries. So at the national level, it's quite easy because people know each other and they were sharing stuff. The trick we use there is to focus on the final project work on every learner. So every learning in this course had to read some stuff, take some modules, run some activities and then develop a final project work, which in most cases is actually an artifact and all you are a piece of the course and so on. And so we, let's say, the bet there is to share and to work together then on these projects, not so much in the learning process, even if, and this was quite surprising to me, the forum discussions in the platform were pretty active. So normally we tend to be, I mean, I'm not quite skeptical about how adult university professors use their time in responding to forum questions, but in this case it worked pretty well. Showing again the interest, I think. Adi and Fabio and Daniel, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.