 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 Daigera 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 fully understand that this view may not be shared by all and I adore a good argument, so I will welcome these discussions when we meet. As such, I also hold a UNESCO chair on open educational resources and artificial intelligence. As you can see, I have chosen to give my introductory talk from the Open, not only to share with you my habitat, but also to pinpoint the fact that this COVID area, the conference is unusual and so the welcome can modify a little the usual standards. To be fair, in the first draft of this welcome, I had even written post-COVID area, before realising that this was outrageously optimistic. Let me just hope that my next welcome talk will be in a post-COVID area. 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. The other thing to say is that it is a fantastic team effort and here I would like to thank a number of people, the Open Education Global Board for having entrusted Universitat de Notte with this organisation. Perhaps when they decided this in September 2020, they weren't aware that they were going to work with us for two editions because, as you probably know, we will also be organising Open Education Global 2022. Come to think of it, I am not sure we really knew what we were getting into either. Second, I would like to thank the Open Education Global team, a truly international group with which we have been meeting weekly for now one full year. Igor and Paul, especially, thanks a lot because it's been great to work with you. There's a number of people who have been involved in Notte and they will be even more involved for the conference, which will take place in Notte in next May. Most importantly, I would like to say thank you to Melanie. She's done a great job and she's always been here to help. We've got two programme chairs who have cooked a fantastic programme that you will be enjoying for the next week, Wayne and Davo. I really hope you will enjoy this programme. The Université de Notte and Madame Karine Bernault, our president, have accepted very quickly to say yes to the conference. We welcome their support and it shows the strong involvement of the university with the Open Course. I will come back to that in a minute. The UNESCO has been with us and specifically ZENEP. Since, well, since the moment we decided we were holding it and the theme of the conference was going to be the recommendation. We've got sponsors and you will be able to hear about them from the conference and they will be present with us. And we would like to thank them because obviously financial support is also important in order to keep the prices low, for example. We've had a number of extra committees who have worked with us. In Notte, an organisation committee has been extremely active and we also put up a francophone scientific committee. This francophone scientific committee was just one step in the direction that led us to make a very exceptional decision. We believed that for open education global to be truly global, we had to demolish the language barriers. Yes, because global doesn't really mean that the whole planet has to learn a unique common language in order to learn. This doesn't make much sense. In 2021, with the fantastic tools we have to do automatic translation, but also with a planet which is probably becoming global in a different way, in a more diverse way, I really think that there is an issue towards pushing very hard multilingualism and this is what we have tried to do in this conference. We have tried to do it doing what by first of all announcing that submissions could be done in any of the six of the official languages of the United Nations. Subitions took place in five out of six of these languages, which were in Arabic, English, in Chinese, in French and in Spanish, which is why our exciting programme not only contains sessions in English, but they also contain sessions in all the languages we have just named. Furthermore, I think that open education global by doing this becomes pioneer and probably other conferences will look at us and think, well, if they did perhaps we can do it too. It may be still a little bit strange to call this event not open education global 2021 as really only a very few of the participants will be from NARTS and even only a couple of organisers. Everybody else will be all over the planet. Nevertheless, we in NARTS 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 NARTS, I mean in the first place Madame Karine Bernaud, president of the Université de NARTS. A president in France is like a chancellor or a rector in other countries or in other universities. Madame Bernaud was elected one year ago on an ambitious programme in which open access and open education were clear landmarks. A few months ago, Université de NARTS 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. For open education, Madame Bernaud appointed a vice president, Arnaud Gevel, with a specific mandate, training and open education. That is in the title of his position. I'm not sure but I believe Université de NARTS 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. I am sure that I will be able to tell you more about NARTS, about what to expect next year. But this is clearly not the topic of the day. 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 programme 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 NARTS and all the organizers and partners, I wish you bienvenue.