 Bonjour. Welcome to Open Education Global 2021. Open Education Global has been the most important global event for open education for many years now. Today, let me be one of those to welcome you to the 2021 full online edition. My name is Colin Daiguerre and I work at Nantes Université, which is in France. I have been in the area of open education for some time now. I am a computer scientist, so I have the point of view that technology can help for open education. I also hold a UNESCO chair on open educational resources and artificial intelligence. So what is Open Education Global 2021? First of all, it is a global conference as accessible as possible and as interactive as possible with the ambition of maintaining the high standards of the previous editions of the conference. Another tremendously important novelty of this year's program is that we have been working for and with UNESCO. As you all know in 2019, the Open Educational Resources recommendation was adopted by all UNESCO member countries. This text and its approval is clearly a landmark. I remember the preparation meetings and the sometimes passionate discussions which took place. I was reporter on one of those meetings and Open Education Global was one of their organizations present and whose opinion mattered a lot. And it was associated with the building of the text. It made therefore a lot of sense to associate Open Education Global with UNESCO in this common cause. Because they both work on a different level where UNESCO provides a global view and is pushing for a better future. It is important that Open Education Global is or remains the place where experiences from the ground and from all over the world are shared and this sharing is established is discussed. It can be passed on to others. So we could put together this global view that is given by the UNESCO and this view from the ground that can be brought up from Open Education Global. This is why UNESCO gave us its patronage which we understand is a rare honor and we have used the same recommendation as the theme for or called for contributions. So the whole program is organized around what is called the five key areas. UNESCO has put together something called the UNESCO Dynamic Coalition which has the goal to actually keep the ball rolling in the course of Open Educational Resources. The UNESCO Dynamic Coalition will be present during the conference and on the first day on the Monday 27th there will be a specific webinar with them as key persons. I think that the coordination which is building here is of great importance and is to be preserved in the future. In France we like talking about les circuits court between being able to reduce the distance between the producer and the consumer. In a way this is what we're trying to do here. Have a short distance between those that are on the ground are testing things, those that are trying, those that are failing, those that are succeeding. Their experiences must go up very very quickly so that from there where we can address the different governments, the different decision makers, we give them informed opinions on what is happening. So I think this is very positive. We are not are very proud to be associated with the prestige of open education global and most importantly with the agenda, the goals and the ambitions of the conference. When I say we in Nantes, I mean in the first place Madame Karine Bernaud, President of the Université de Nantes. Madame Bernaud was elected one year ago on an ambitious program in which open access and open education were clear landmarks. A few months ago, Université de Nantes started also promoting open energy innovation. Our ambition is to push the three open agendas simultaneously and even in the COVID days where there is so much to do just to keep going, the ambition is at the core of the university's policy. I'm not sure but I believe Université de Nantes is in the francophone world at least, a pioneer with respect to the ambition for openness which is why we are proud to host this edition virtually and also proud to host the next one in May 2022. The topic of the day is that we have got more than 20 webinars, more than 30 asynchronous activities in five languages. We've got webinars over nearly all continents. A program which is going to be mixing analysis of the difficulties on the grounds, reports on successes, presentations of shared ambitions, all over five days. And this is why in the name of Université de Nantes and all the organizers and partners, I wish you bienvenue.