 We might start. I welcome everyone to this Friday's webinar within the framework of the European Distance Learning Week. We have been attending different and very interesting webinars during this week. We had different inputs and clues and I'm sure that today it will be very, very interesting to have this touch of international experiences with lawyers. As you can see here, we have a very important panel here, apart from myself of course, and why we decided to include a view on international experiences. First of all, because it's important, I think this kind of sessions are very important for networking and for the possibility to know more about each other's work in the field of open resources, exchange regarding activities, but also different approaches from a cultural point of view are very interesting and to be valued. So I don't want to steal more time with my reflections. We'll have first Martin James Weller presenting his contribution on evaluating or impact. Martin is from the Open University. He is professor at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University, in fact, and he is the director of the Oral Hub Research Unit examining the impact of open education. So I think he's really an expert who can tell us about this sort of impact. The floor to you, Martin. Thank you. I'm showing your presentation in a moment. I've got lots of big pictures, so it might take time to load. It's a little bit, yeah, because there are so many pictures, but it will come. The audio is okay? Yeah, perfect for me. I think for everyone. Hi, everyone. I'm in Cardiff in Wales at the moment. You may see my dog walking around behind me occasionally because this is usually his walk time, so he's best for me to go for a walk at the moment. So the talk I'm about to give is a slightly reduced version of one I gave in Rotterdam this week, actually, at the SURF conference. So it may still, it probably means I'm going to go over lots of subjects in not enough detail, but we'll see. Yeah, unfortunately. I can see it. Yeah, but also we, yeah, we tried a minute ago at this photo working. Maybe Christina is trying to fix it. Just a few moments. Okay, here it is. Okay, here we go. Okay, thank you. Sorry. So I'm going to talk about open education more broadly and sort of how OER fits into that by trying to sort of think of it as a landscape. And I'm going to draw on a couple of bits of research that I've been doing with others to do that. So firstly, I thought I'd think about why is it important to try and address that question? Why should we care about open education and OER? Then look at that kind of landscape. What do we mean? What are the various areas under that? And then what are the impacts and issues? I'm not going to do this bit of that where it's heading. That was in my longer talk, so you won't get that bit. So just going back to those things about why is it important. And I think that actually it's not a question we ask ourselves very often. We kind of, because it's openness, it's good. It's a kind of like it's a kind of default assumption that OER and open education are just good things. But I think it's worth thinking about what their role is in education. So there's a kind of growing demand for higher education. So the British Council reckons there's going to be another 21 million places, additional places needed in higher education by 2020. And another report has it at 100 million by 2025. So there's a real problem that kind of traditional approaches, traditional infrastructure won't be able to cope with that increase in demand. And also a lot of that growth will be seen in countries like the Philippines, China, Brazil. And many of those students may not be able to attend a face-to-face university. They may be working. So the needs of the people coming into higher education is liable to change. And for the first time in the U.S., and but also elsewhere, we're seeing that what we used to think of as the traditional student is no longer the majority. So the 18 to 22-year-old studying full-time on campus, that's now not the majority mode of studies. People are older than that. You're often studying part-time, blended learning. And those people have different needs and different demands. Often they've got family, work, different issues. And also they're studying for different motivations as well. So again, the traditional model might not fit all of the students now. And increasingly, a digital economy requires people to have different types of skills. So I live in Wales. We developed a competence framework, a digital competence framework that goes across all primary and secondary education. So regardless of what subjects you're studying, you develop certain digital competencies like learning to research online. And whilst openness is not the same as digital, there are elements of openness, I think that we can learn from here, learning how to share, how to be part of a community. And also I think increasingly, particularly given what we've seen happen in 2016, 2017, we live in an era of fake news. In my own country in the UK, we had a government minister saying people have had enough of experts and stuff. So I think open education plays an important role in how universities position themselves within society and that kind of much broader role they have. So I think just in general, higher education needs to be more flexible. And open education isn't the only way it can do that. But I think it has some things to say about that, that need flexibility in how to approach it. So that's my kind of why, why we bothered about it. Next, looking at what. So working with Viv Rolf, Owen DeVries and Katie Jordan, particularly Katie Jordan is my ex PhD student, we had a conversation, I'd mislead it was in a bar at the OpenEd conference, and Viv had done some work looking at the papers that people cite in open education. And she sort of found, and I think it was generally our sense that not, so open education in particularly in North America has come to mean the OER movement, perhaps MOOCs as well, but less kind of reference back to that early open education work. And so what we did was we did a search through library databases on some keywords on open education, use those and got the references from all those papers and saw who they had referenced. And then put that into a piece of software called Geffrey to create a kind of citation analysis. What you get is this kind of spreading activation network of different citations and references. I don't know if this will work. You can see the kind of citation spreading there. So which ones reference each other begin to grow and spread kind of like a social media network. And you find you get these these node papers, nude articles that lots of people reference. So that's pretty. I didn't think that would work. That looks good. Yeah, so this was, so we went through two or three iterations of this. So taking the papers that those people had cited, and then looking at the ones that they had further cited. And then we went back and said, are there any areas that are missing kind of any key references that we wanted to put in? And we added those in as well. What we ended up with was this kind of map here. It's not kind of completed. There's about 170 papers. And obviously, there's a lot more than that you could come up with. But they kind of roughly fall into these eight categories. And I think it was interesting because our perception that open education, distance education wasn't referenced by a lot of the other groups was born out really. So you can see distance education down in the bottom right and OER sort of in the middle there. And also there's not an awful lot of overlap between OER and MOOCs. They've begun to kind of form separate communities in a way. But the thing that sort of binds them together is this idea of open practices, which is perhaps less well defined. So I'm just going to talk about some of those briefly, those areas. Perhaps I don't need to in this audience. But anyway, so Open Universities. So I'm from the Open University in the UK. So we were founded in 1969. And that model of a national or at least a large-scale university offering just distance education, no barriers to entry, part-time study, was a model that was copied very successfully kind of around the world. And that's what open education meant for a long time. And then we have open access publications. And this is quite a robust piece of practice now. So in many countries we have mandates that if you publish openly you have to, if you have public funding then you need to release your papers under an open access license. And all there is kind of, there's issues around how publishers relate to that. That's kind of fairly robust. OERs I think are kind of on a, in the middle ground at some point at the moment. They're a bit, so if open access publishing is like a nice, robust city that's kind of been established for a long time in this landscape. OER is kind of like a friendly, bustling town, open educational resources that might expand, it might stay the same size. I think it's kind of on the edge of the mainstream as it were. Particularly I think the open textbook approach in the US. MOOCs I think are kind of a bit like these ghost cities that tend to get built where they hope an infrastructure will move in and it will take off. But at the moment we're kind of not sure at the moment. And open educational practice I think is more about finding your own individual path between all these things. You've got finding your own map through that, through that landscape. So to think about some of the issues. So there was a Commonwealth of Learning report out recently which I'm sure some of you will have read. And also some of the research we did in the OER research hub. Awareness is still a big issue of OER. So we asked people, we asked educators where they go to find their online resources. And it was YouTube, Khan Academy, maybe Ted Talks and that was it. All these wonderful OER repositories we have at the bottom just didn't register at all really. So I think there's kind of just awareness of OERs as a thing. And the sustainability argument comes up quite a lot. So in the UK the GISC here funded a lot of OER projects earlier on. And when the two-year funding finished and you went back to those projects a bit after, a lot of them had just stopped working. It only lasted as long as the external funding was there. So I think finding models that allow sustainability around OER is an issue. Or they'll come back to kind of the economics a bit later. Reward structures I think particularly in terms of universities. Does a university recognize open educational practice if you release OERs? Is it something that's going to get you promotion? Is the advice still published? Make sure you publish in the same journals, even if they're closed journals or open access journals. So until we change the reward structures that the message people get is that this stuff isn't worth bothering with. And there's also a kind of an element of suspicion and discredit around this. So particularly a lot of the commercial publishers saw open access as a challenge to them. So they tried to discredit the quality of it. And you see this also with open textbook publishers. But also I think just ourselves as practitioners, a lot of educators still worry about things that are free. You know, if it's free it can't be good value. But also I think a lot of our identity and self-worth is kind of wrapped up with being an educator and we're expected to be the expert on a subject. So by using someone else's material I used to demonstrate in a weakness and how will students react to that. And lastly I think a real big issue is just habit and time. I mean how many educators do we meet? We say I have loads of spare time. It's not many. So anything that's new kind of requires extra time and extra effort. And I think open textbooks are a really good example of this. So even if it saves students money by giving them a free open textbook, for the educator it's a cost because they have to learn a new textbook, what that textbook covers. And often when you're pressured for time you just fall back on the same slides that you used last year, the same resources you used before. So it needs to be an investment in time as well. And know-how as well there is, you know, I think it's got better. I think people know how to share stuff a lot more than they used to. Slides like slide share and that kind of make that fair easily. But there is still some kind of technical biases. But also I think just know-how about creative commons license, for instance. You know, like knowledge of how to share, how to share effectively, use the social media for sharing and things. So there is a kind of barrier on how to do this. So just look at the impact now. So across those different areas there's the open access citation advantage, which has been found in various studies. So articles that are published under an open access license tend to have more citations and more downloads than those that are behind a proprietary wall. And I think that's particularly true in a social media becomes a greater part of the dissemination channels. So there's no point putting a tweet out saying, I just published a fantastic article. When someone clicks on the link it says, now I pay $30 to access this article. You may as well just bury it in your back garden because no one's going to read that. So open access kind of allows dissemination through the networks. So I mentioned there was kind of an attempt to kind of discredit the idea of open textbooks, particularly in the US. So a lot of the work that people like David Wiley and John Hilton have done is trying to demonstrate that open textbooks are as good, if not better than the kind of proprietary published textbooks. So there's a kind of first-do-no-harm principle. And through a number of studies they've demonstrated that they're either as good, if not better in terms of student performance, student retention, quality as judged by peers and those kind of things. So first of all we move the argument that OER is not as good. And often they're kind of finding impacts such as because particularly in the US, textbooks can be quite expensive. And so a lot of students put off buying a textbook until sort of two or three weeks into the course until they know the educator is actually going to use it because often they'll say buy this textbook and then they don't actually use it. So then those students are kind of behind and they might catch up and particularly disadvantaged students may not be able to afford the textbook. So whereas with an open textbook, they know that all students have the textbook from day one and they can teach accordingly. So it kind of can impact upon performance and retention. A kind of not often covered area I think is OER used by existing students. So some of the research we did at OER Hub found particularly in the country like the UK where the student fees are quite an issue. We found a lot of students were using OER to test out a subject before they started studying it because we pay £9,000 a year usually here. We don't want to spend £9,000 studying for one year just before deciding that actually you don't want to do psychology after all you want to do sociality. So a lot of students are trialling subjects and OER are a really good way to do that because they usually form universities, they give you a good taste of the sort of thing you'd have to get into. But also we found students who are already in study formal education are using OER to supplement their studies. They may be studying physics at one university but accessing MIT, Harvard, OER from another university. It can be used to expand the curriculum so at Delft University for instance they're using, they've accredited some books from other providers and said to students you can take these and gain formal credit with us. So it allows you to kind of expand the curriculum you can offer your students. And increasingly I think we see them in course creation. I think this was an area a few years ago people were reluctant to bring in content but we've all just kind of got used to sharing content more. So whether it's open access publications, use of videos or open textbooks within courses I think people are beginning to pull that in and use those more often in their courses. And we're doing for time I'll best wrap up. New institutional models. So I think we're only beginning to see this little bit but things like the OER University which is a kind of cooperative organisation between universities who offer their courses freely available on the platform but they can still have their own cohort or study and that cohort gets the tuition and support, the local support. And they're beginning to offer the first year of study free so you can do the two courses, business studies and kind of general studies. You can do it free to the OERU, get formal accreditation and then you're into the formal education system then. And I talked about sustainability I think an area that's of interest what I call open flip economics. So a cable green of Creative Commons says that you know we have lots of money in education we're just really bad at spending it. And so the model we tend to have is that we pay to purchase a copyright good but what OpenFlip does is kind of switch on its head and say why don't we pay to produce something but then it's openly licensed. So they're seen through textbooks instead of schools and universities purchasing textbooks will pay you to produce, we'll get some writers together, pay you to produce it but then it's openly licensed and can be freely used. And I think that's a model we might see more of so libraries have reasonable budgets but it all goes to publishers but instead you might pay to produce an open textbook but also just an OER around particular subjects that we might want to share. I probably won't go into this I think my time's up. So Dominic is talking and I are also doing some work for ITD on what's called Open Online Flexible and Technology Enhanced Education. So we've kind of broken education offering down into three main aspects content delivery and recognition and there are two dimensions to that which are flexibility and openness and we surveyed a number of institutions around the world and we kind of we can map them across their different dimensions and how they're responded. What you see is you get these different patterns that start to emerge so people are using openness for different things in institutions so this one for instance it's all around flexibilities and openness allows them to be flexible in terms of their offering to students and we've kind of split up the different approaches to openness there. So I think that the key point there is that openness is not just one thing to institution some are using it for very specific purposes some it's kind of caught everything they do and some it's kind of reaching particularly audiences they want to address. I think I'll end with this slide here so we also surveyed about their use of technology and just a quick point this is not really about openness but there's almost a kind of inverse proportion to the amount of headlines a technology gets and how much is actually used artificial intelligence is kind of hard to use for anybody but has all the kind of big headlines whereas the three core things all relate very directly to those three elements of recognition delivery and content. So that's my quick overview of all things open education and I'll end there. Thank you so much Martin for your very inspiring presentation I noted some reflections and I hope I'll be able to to ask some questions in the end. So we'll move actually to my own presentation so we are always talking about international experiences and the one I'm presenting here is related to my direct experience. In research on OARS and in particular actually Martin very correctly separated OARS from MOOCs which is of course correct. In our inexperience I'm going to introduce you we actually worked on MOOCs development considering them as open resources. I will clarify on that in a minute. The other aspect that I need to clarify at the beginning of this presentation is that the title says impact on learning. I would say that more than learning meant as content knowledge acquisition what we wanted to identify to get was how much the students could develop their cross-sectional skills in particular critical thinking skills. I'll just underline a couple of things regarding critical thinking. We have been working for five years now I would say on the development of critical thinking skills in higher education students especially in environments supported by technology. Why? Also in Martin's presentation actually this topic came out because we said that we need to make younger generations higher education students in particular being able to reflect to be autonomous in their judging to understand which kind of resources is best to use. We are overwhelmed with information being connected all the time. So we really need to work on the development of certain skills like critical thinking in particular. And we started studying the definitions regarding critical thinking developed through the Delphi report which was a report created developed by a group of experts who summoned in California in the 90s. But anyway what do we mean by critical thinking? We mean that kind of thinking which helps us analyzing assessing reconstructing reality. And we took as a reference this model related to different skills critical thinking included of course that was our main focus but also other kind of of skills were taken into consideration in this analysis in this project research project we carried out with our students collaboration communication creativity and critical thinking as I said. The first question we started from was to understand if it was possible if it's possible to measure critical thinking skills critical thinking skills in higher education students through MOOCs. Why MOOCs? There are different different reasons. First of all you need to know that the students who took part in this research project are education students in educational sciences so education students. MOOCs and open resources are really the issue on which every educator should be ready to to to work and with such resources should be ready to work as we as we said. And so in our view the idea that the students could be involved in developing a MOOC on a certain specific topic I will tell you in a minute could be a way to support increase their critical thinking and as I said the four C's skills in general reflecting on what they were doing reflecting on the searches that could use to build these courses addressed to other teachers dealing with dealing with heritage fruition cultural heritage fruition within primary school education teaching and learning. You see here another slide related to the environment I would say the framework where this kind of project took place. This pilot we experienced we carried out with our students was in fact developed within a European project the DEACHE project which means digital innovation in cultural and heritage education in the light of 21st century learning. It is an Erasmus Plus project six partners participated different European countries the UK, Netherlands, Italy of course Belgium. It's going to hang next February but the main pillars of this project were development of the four C's skills training of teachers of primary school teachers enabling them to use technology and integrate cultural heritage fruition in their teaching and learning programs. So that's why you understand why we tried to help students facilitate students developing of MOOCs in particular using open resources. Why museums and heritage? First of all because in the national guidelines in Italy in particular but especially at the European level there's a prompt from different agencies to support this kind of education especially with the help of technology and within formal frameworks like primary school teaching and learning. Considering that the aims of the project were related to teachers training especially in the use of technology in their teaching and learning in this environment of museum education and primary school teaching and learning we thought that we could reach the different objectives at the same at the same time. Their relation MOOCs and museums is a fairly recent one. We know about the critics related to MOOCs the difficulties especially in considering dropout rates and so on and so forth but we have also considered that in museum environments the idea of promoting the dissemination of their collection content and the use of technology is getting bigger and bigger so we thought that that could have been a good way to reach both museum objectives and education objectives. What did the students were asked to do during this training? First of all take part in critical online discussions in groups working on specific topics related to of course museum education in primary school investigate issues of course of their interest guided always by tutors online develop and create MOOCs courses in the field of museum education evaluate the use of such tools and especially evaluate the courses that were created by their made by their colleagues during this activity to know how to use of course a virtual environment to know how to use collaborative writing tools because of course all these activities were carried out online and so they had to project and design their courses together working online and writing together they had to become familiar with MOOCs as a concept and this was not so easy actually because they referred that they didn't know about MOOCs and they didn't know what a book was until they had this kind of training with us they could participate also in an international contest in the field of museum education and they could know and use the necessary tools to write an article in a foreign language because English of course for them was a foreign language in order to participate in this international contest which was the hypothesis from which we started our research we thought that students who use a specific tool to evaluate MOOC quality because that was the real end of this activity making them work on on the creation of the MOOC first of course but then they had to evaluate the course assess the quality of the course so self reflect on their own work but also reflect on others work and so we thought that carrying out this this kind of activity they were able to deepen their understanding of online teaching and learning and acquire sharper critical and analytical approaches in a minute I'll show you what we collected from this analysis the the main methodology I want you know go too too deep in in the details of course here but I can tell you that the main methodology we adopted was peer assessment carried out individually by each student through this activity they had the possibility to gain 1.6 ECTS credits and the activity lasted around 40 hours and 42 students participated activity and reached the end of the activity of the course the model we used and the model we asked them to to keep as a reference was a very traditional one it's the lexical magistralist framework so you see some Latin here but when you get to to know which each part what each part described you recognize actually the structure of a traditional and widely used tutorial of course we had the presentation of the subject introducing the context the order the setting of the work they were dealing with so the topic I would say then a discussion of pros and cons between sorry Divisio so the analysis aimed at understanding the consecutive elements of the text a discussion on the pros and cons between students and the tutor and then the question the text following the analysis the group tutor discussions is subject to a global and critical interpretation so different points but always keeping the same the same structure in each group development of the construction of the course why first of all to have the possibility to compare and to have a fixed reference for the students that as I said were not acquainted at all with all these new things they were they were learning during this activity and then because this kind of model this kind of structure of teaching learning structure has been as proved to be successful over a long time and so this means that it can be taken as a good reference the activities as I said they had different activities to carry out they had three face-to-face meetings and then the rest of the activities were all carried out online why these face-to-face meetings we needed to introduce the subject and to be sure that they were actually understanding what their assignments were they had of course the first meeting was firstly addressed to that aim but also the intermediate face-to-face meeting was needed because they they had the possibility to share to present their their work and what they did so far and they could interact with all the groups together and gain important suggestions inputs and so on and then a final meeting when they could actually assess and evaluate each other's work I told you about peer assessment that was our idea of successful assessment successful formative assessment and the tool we developed to make students reflect and evaluate assess each other's work was composed of different sessions it was actually a questioner very very articulated by the questioner and focusing on the course so on what they did with us and on the MOOC itself some results as you can see as regards course content so that the content they developed in each in each program you can see here as regards the structure the completeness most of the groups gained good marks something maybe I forgot to tell you is that the 42 students who participated in the activity when they had to create the MOOCs they had to work in in different small groups made of five six elements at the most as you can see the four and five mark were the most frequent as regards the MOOC quality the MOOC they created and so each other each person each student was evaluating the other MOOCs you see that we used as criteria designer and graphic presentation and content coverage of course as I said the content was always the same it was related to museum education so they had to develop MOOCs on museum education for primary school teachers then other criteria we asked them to reflect on were related to the skills that those specific MOOCs were intended to support and to develop and so as you can see for instance creativity and collaboration were mainly reached by by every group there are some groups that of course had a better impact some less as regards these two criteria two indicators but anyway all of them reached the objectives and developed the objectives when we go to critical thinking and communication especially as regards critical thinking being a very complex construct it was a little bit more difficult but anyway we had feedback from that a good feedback from that as regards the general assessment of the MOOC creation as you can see all the groups had a sufficient score so a past score and some also were over the average we are carrying out further analysis especially as regards critical thinking using content analysis which is the most difficult part content analysis where we carried out and is actually going to be carried out is carried out on every piece of writing that the students produced online while developing these courses it is as you might imagine a difficult issue because we are going to understand in in this student's production different indicators they are listed here I think I'm I'm running out of time so I just mentioned the main categories so justification relevance importance critical evaluation novelty new ideas and here you have the description of each indicator and according to this model of content analysis we are we would like to get more information regarding what they did and the development each student had on critical thinking issues this is the model we are going to use we are using actually to measure this kind of indicators that's also the formula we are of course working as different in a group of researchers and each researcher is actually evaluating this kind of students production so taking into consideration this this formula we are very visionary and we are trying also to work on a possible automatic revision of this kind of production according to to this criteria is something which is very difficult to reach but we are actually trying getting to the conclusion we thought that this kind of work of structure we build could have been innovative it was in line of course with the aims of the the European project where this activity is set there's this idea of connection between MOOCs or in in in general in a wider sense and cultural heritage which is a very how can I say sensitive issue in in Italy especially because we need to develop and to support educational attention to cultural heritage issues because that is our one of the main resources of the country so that's why we need to support that as a country but of course this idea of spreading culture is essential in the time we are living to develop certain skills and to be able to to be free citizens I think so I think I got to to to the end of my presentations the others in the group there are also other researchers who participated as you might imagine because the work was a lot the other participants in the group are here Francesco Agrusti and Maria Rosario who are members of the group so I thank you so much and again we I hope you will have some questions in the end to also understand better what I told you about now I think that it's time to give the floor to Chintia so let me see here it is Chintia she is the head of the OR lab smart learning institute in Beijing normal university thank you Chintia for being with us of course and she will tell us about the current state of advance of advancement of OR in China and Zilipno thank you Chintia and please the word to you can you hear me hello hi thank you okay thank you hello everyone thanks for your interest in my presentation and I come from the open educational resources lab smart learning institute of Beijing normal university also today I'm I'm honored to share the current state of advancement of OER in China and show you whatever life have done in the past two years for OER this is the model that we developed to assess the development level of OER in a country which will be published in a spring book soon and the current state the current development of OER in China will be also presented by discussing each factor included in this model let's first we look at the infrastructure which will be presented from the perspectives of both technology and the repository and as for the technology and we can see that the internites access in China is higher than the global average and the computer student ratio in China is a little it's a little bit lower than the global average and the repository actually you know the infrastructure is established and it may tend in in China you know are made by government university or companies these are some good example repositories in China for example the national educational resources public service platform established by ministry of education of China and the normal you learn national e-learning resource center built by the open university of China and 101 education pbt built by net drug and company any of the policies are very important factor for the development of OER and the policy can be made by those governments and the institution in China from the government level different government departments are responsible for making different policies about OER for example the ministry of education is responsible for developing specific educational policies and the plans for production and the use of OER and the ministry of science and technology just up signs and technology policies that promote the use of OER you know support the some the support some you know basic technology establishment in China and the ministry of finance creates funding policies to provide OER grants and so on these are some very important policies made by China Chinese government and you can see that the first policy of OER is proposed in the year of 2000 which is even earlier than when the concept of OER is firstly proposed by UNESCO in the year of 2002 we compiled the main contents of these important policies made by Chinese government in recent years with the main ideas proposed by UNESCO in Paris or your declaration in 2015 and we thought that eight of the ten aspects are consistent between UNESCO and China except that the open licensing are rarely mentioned in Chinese policy and these are some very important policies produced by institutions of China you know open license is also a very important factor to assess the development of OER and there are three types of open license in China the first one is educational resources reset in public domain they are and protected by copyright law but the permit for using and reusing freely the second type is the resources openly licensed such as those under CC and the last type refers to the resources authorized by government for public freely use. CC China was established in the very very early time actually has ever not many Chinese people would like to use DC and the mainstream educational platforms still adopted the copyright law of China as for the resources in China we have different formats of OER such as the audio, video, cosware and we can search the resources by different ways like by subjects, educational levels, topics, institutions and even by assessment and the resources the open resources in China covers different educational level like K-12, higher education, vocational education and informal education and you can see the amount of resources in China are very huge and you can see only in Baidu platform you can find over 150 million documents online as for the curriculum and the pathology in classroom we use the flipped classroom, the curriculum classes and blended learning to teach with OER and we also have MOOCs and some other OER tools like 101 education PPT to support self-learning out of classroom. The outcomes of OER in China refers to different levels from the school level and the OER can help reduce costs, develop network between educators and expertise and from the level of classroom the OER can be helpful for increasing the variety of classroom activities and also can assist the teachers in providing useful learning tasks and from the educator level the OER can help the school community and increase educational quality and from the student's perspective OER is helpful for them to increase the ability to access resources for learning and also can support independent and informal learning at home. The stakeholders in China include policymakers, university and school leaders, educators, teachers, librarians, researchers, learners and parents. You can see these stakeholders are also the users of OER, they are very inclusive. All the factors we discussed above included in the model will contribute to the development of OER in China and the final way together contribute to promoting and achieving SDG floor. We also have some challenges for the development of OER in China, for example we still need to promote the public awareness, we need to further develop, make the development of open listening systems in China and we also need to explore more ways to get some findings to support OER development. We also need some empirical studies to get evidence about the outcomes of OER and we also need to increase the teacher trainings to have to use OER in their teaching. Okay so just you know as what we mentioned about the current development of OER in China and let's look at what we have done for OER in the past two years. This is a brief introduction of our institute, the smart learning institute of Beijing Normal University serves as experimental platform comparison scientific research technology technology development and education and our institute is jointly established by Beijing Normal University and the Alernerty Company so we refer to different areas of research. Our OER lab is to study on the solution of OER and or is impacted to the developing countries constructed the OER community for the belt and road countries and also publish some reports on the trends of ICT education. These are some main research areas of our lab and including ICT education research, OER research, OER platform, educational research database and all of these research interests are carried out based on the OER international community. These are some outcomes that we have in the past two years. We have published one book and three national reports. We also have a database and a platform which are under construction and will be open to the public soon. This is our OER international community so far we have established strong partnerships with some institutions and experts from over 30 countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, some Central and Eastern European countries like Serbia and some Arab countries. We ask you, you know, always calling for partners from more countries for our OER community and you are very welcome to join us if you are interested using OER to achieve STJ4 promoting global collaboration and sharing network resources and knowledge. Okay, this is what I want to share today and thank you for your listening. Thank you so much, Cynthia, for your report on the Chinese situation regarding OER. So it's a very interesting landscape, of course. And I have one question for you but we'll leave it to the end. And so now let's introduce Dominic. Dominic Hor. Let me share your presentation. Here it is. Dominic is actually a British national but has a doctorate in comparative education from the Technical University of Dresden. For over a decade he worked for the German Center for Higher Education and Science as senior researcher and international project leader on higher education governance and conditions of student life. He was the lead author of the OECD synapses report on OER development across the world published in 2015 and other important publications. Currently, his senior researcher at Babes Research Institute for the Economics of Education Sorry and Social Affairs in Berlin where he is evaluating the feasibility of the UNESCO or Global Monitoring Initiative and leading a project with the International Council on Open and Distance Education on digital adoption of higher education provisions and the OFOT model. So thank you so much for being with us and please the floor to you for your report on the German experience. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Antonina. Can you hear me? Okay. The sound's all right. Okay. So yes, thank you very much for this opportunity to talk a little bit about Germany but also OER in the context of what's happening in Germany and what's happening in the world. It was really nice to hear the previous presentations. So Martin started out by saying, maybe as OER we're in a bustling town and we have to try and get into the big town and establish ourselves. One of those ways I think is pretty much what Antonina was describing which are these kind of new demands which are coming into the education sector and one of those is trying to think of ways we can give people new skills, new learning skills on the one side through digitalization on the other hand through the increasing diversity in our education systems and the thing that Cynthia presented which was really nice is just to show also how OER fits into their whole strategy of ICT in education and how it's kind of seems to have developed quite a bit out of that. These are things that are very relevant for the German case because we can be called in Germany late starters so late comers to the OER area. It's not exactly true and I'll come back to this in a minute but essentially if you look at you know our international presence it's been quite low until recently but there's a lot been has been happening kind of in the background and a lot of that is now coming to the foreground and coming together in a nice interesting way which is what I would like to talk about. Just to tell you though that together with my colleagues Jan Neumann and Jürgen we also did a publication on this where the developments explain a bit more in detail. Just to this background point firstly of what are the big kind of trends going through policy debate and those that are particularly relevant for education and I thought since we are in the e-learning week maybe just to track in the German area what about Google trends looking at one or two of the key terms that we're used to in the German area. One of those is e-learning other ones you can see there are optimization the MOOCs of course industry 4.0 and digitalization. What I want to emphasize actually is you can see if we were in 2014 e-learning was still a really really quite a big topic in terms of at least search terms that the people are putting into Google whereas now you see in Germany the big topic going well above everything else is digitalization and this is relevant because at the moment practically all of the German states are developing digitalization strategies which are very comprehensive strategies some of the early starter states focus on particular areas for example as I mentioned already industry 4.0 but what we're seeing at the moment is these very comprehensive strategies about how one of the how a German state would like to meet the challenges coming through digitalization and within that we've got the question of education and failing and we need within that most of those strategies are now mentioning OER so that's really a lot to do with the the landscape that we have in Germany. So if we're looking at this landscape or here I've called it the playing field just to go back a stage first we have had a very strong and we have a very strong grassroots movement in Germany and this has become less this is less present because in a way on the policy level we've been a bit slow going and we've been late comers so we have many many champions of OER and the interesting thing is over the years now they developed a very strong community of practice exchange many many through many many bar camps particularly so on conferences there've been chances for people to come together from the community and talk about what they're doing and what challenges they have of trying to get their grassroots development more established. Now what we have is coming on the one hand really through this digitalization in education we have kind of the bigger debate coming through which is okay education now has to change because of the challenges for digitalization and OER is being put into this kind of mainstream agenda at the moment however if you actually look at what's written OER is mentioned in a very limited way mentioned mostly in terms of just providing more materials which are more up-to-date this doesn't very much very well reflect what's actually happening in the grassroots initiatives where there's been much more of a focus on what can we do that's cool what can we do this innovative through using OER and here you can see on the right hand side of this like just as a picture which is which comes from the OER world map there's a special page now where you can see developments in Germany you can see that right across Germany we've we've got these OER active people or OER developments now the interesting thing that's happened over the very recent really past two years has been a coming together of what I was mentioning there the educational agenda Martin talked a lot about it in his presentation diversity of the people body diversity of the student body and the fact that if you have diversity in learners you need diverse paths you need diverse ways to support students so this is seen as a big agenda in Germany at the moment then we have basically we need new content because of the digital digital agenda but we also need new learning opportunities so these things are coming together and kind of from bottom up then this OER community now two years ago a very interesting initiative was launched which is funding from the German government from the federal government it's a program of 6.6 million euros running for two years and essentially what it does and this is really quite interesting is it picks up on the idea that we do have a strong community so within this this OER program to support OER most of the projects which have been supported about about things like training the trainer so capacity building helping people understand how they can be using OER and also kind of network activities which is bringing people together so this coming together has really been quite quite interesting and quite specific I think to the German situation if we look at no let me just go back to one thing before I come to because I've got a bit more time than I thought it would have normally as the last person you've got much less time so let me just mention two things really so at the moment in Germany it's been the case that a lot of the initiatives have been in the school area they've been very much supported through higher education people in higher education but it's been things like thinking of new ways of teacher training but also thinking of new ways of providing you know more activated authentic type of learning within within the school setting and one very interesting thing on the top-down level is almost all of the German states have what they call a an educational media platform where they collect materials which teachers within their state generally speaking can be using to enrich their learning their teaching and learning these so-called building server these educational platform they got together about a year and a half ago and decided that if possible they would so they set a principle that the principle is OER first for all these materials so as as much as possible they will be developing these materials as OER and they're also there's a certain construction within Germany which enables also these platforms to exchange the materials between each other so this is very interesting to see there that these these servers are working together and another thing I wanted to mention because that's almost the next part in the pipeline is okay so now you've got these materials now you have to use these materials or you would like to use these materials within your classroom setting we know through their research and Martin already mentioned it that one of the problems with OER is how to actually use it in a sensible way how to use it in a in a simple way also for people who want to just have something simple that they can almost plug and play and then using their classrooms and so we've had one just just to mention one example we've had one very interesting development which is an OER editor which is being provided by an organization called Tutori Tutori was set up as a project but it's turned now into a startup and at the moment it's just making the transition between this kind of donation or grants-based funding to a funding base which is based on subscriptions and it's really being used quite a lot because it's tried to get to exactly this point of how can we make it easier for teachers to use OER so I think this is a very interesting initiative another one which might surprise you as well because in the OER space we're very used to talking about the publishers as the baddies and also as people who as organizations which find it hard to innovate certainly we can see that one or two of the publishers are actually at least testing or experimenting with the idea of OER for some of their product so one of those publishers called Nielsen has now brought out two books using a Creative Commons BYSA license which I think is very interesting so it is true however I think as Martin mentioned at the moment we don't really have any complete courses being offered in Germany as OER but you can see that in a way and that's why I chose the title of my presentation there's been much more of a focus on trying to get things easily into classroom settings or educational settings and then to try and use that to to promote innovation and I think in that context this idea of saying okay a lot of the government support is there to actually help and support this and activate this kind of innovation is interesting of course despite that you still need to change some of the policy framework conditions and you need to think about funding so with that let me just come to the four lessons we drew through looking at the case in Germany and to see okay what things do we think one can maybe apply to other countries as well so the first one I've mentioned quite a lot and there we see that there's a potential for OER to support emerging educational debates and we really see that this is happening so this is really the chance now for OER to really get into the mainstream where it really becomes interesting because then it's full potential can actually be developed inside of the established system also through the German case we can say well you know there really are and I think we find that in many countries a significant number of OER practitioners and we have to think of ways to support those and one of those ways governments can become more active in that. You know we're in Germany so we love laws so of course copyright is a major issue for us and it's been interesting because there's one one established story here in Germany that the OER was really pushed when the publishers actually started to say in 2011 we're going to check now how much copyright is actually being misused within the school setting and we want to actually start charging those schools for all of that misuse and one of the arguments is well okay well since that happened a lot of people look for a new way around or a new solution to that and that's where we came to OER. I think that's true and I think that it definitely explains a lot of the OER initiatives from those people who are very active in the area but I think also when we discuss this situation of what how is copyright organized and what significance does it have for teachers and for tutors the German copyright situation is quite tricky and we actually think perhaps also because it's quite tricky it also makes people very much more unsure so in the actual report we call for two things which is really a simplification of the copyright law but also of course making more use of things outside of this copyright in terms of creative commons or the kind of copy left idea. The last thing I'd like to mention because this is very important to us the authors of the report and I think it was great that Cynthia particularly mentioned it and of course Martin with his work in the OER or the Open Educational Research Hub is pushing this as well. We do need more research but we of course we need more research that goes beyond just looking at textbooks. We need research which is capturing as many of these rich stories we can find of all the initiatives around the world but we also need to try and look at ways of representing the impact that OER can have. We used as a baseline the entries within the OER world map because we found that very helpful and that enabled us for Germany to provide some really nice statistics on what's happening in Germany so we really think the OER world map can be further developed in this way but one thing we actually criticise in the program I've just mentioned in Germany where I said it's a great program because it's supporting capacity building. This program supported by the government doesn't foresee at all an accompanying monitoring of what's happening and this is really vital. It's vital for us in the community in the space who want to support OER but it's also vital for policymakers because they have to be able to see what impact various initiatives are having. So on that last point I will leave you with that to conclude some of the questions. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Dominic. Yeah in fact you're right. I always think that you know we don't focus enough on evaluation and assessment or monitoring and that is that an important part of what we do because then we need to understand if we actually reach our objectives or not. So thank you so much. I hope we can get some questions from participants anyway have some so we have a way to let me get this one so that we can have again your names in the front. So I can see questions but maybe we can warm up with one of mine which is actually addressed to all of you. I mean Dominic, Martin, Ginza, all of you because actually we have learned from your presentation that there's a considerable attention to OER and resources to be used in educational settings. There are also different policies I see to support the use of such resources. In Italy we don't have a great support in that sense anyway but from what you told us there's a considerable support. My question is actually related to practice. Do you think, do you know about your colleagues? I mean the neighbor, our colleague, do they actually use open resources? I mean we said that you know how they should be used, how they you know you also showed numbers in that sense but according to your personal perceptions what happens you know in our universities, in our educational institutions. Dominic, I see you wanted to give a feedback. I can't hear you. I would argue probably similarly to Martin but I'm sure you can add to it if you want. I mean I do think this general argument which was particularly published whilst looking at the OER program in the UK was that essentially we're looking at an iceberg so whenever we actually ask are people using OER? In fact one of the major problems we have is what do people understand us on OER? So people are using educational resources in the kind of way we would like them to use. So in terms of you know de facto, are they using something similar to OER in a way that we would expect? I think you would find a lot of people, a lot of instructors, a lot of teachers are but generally speaking this is more to do with them ignoring the copyright issue and so my one of my major arguments for OER is in fact OER clarifies exactly this copyright issue. You really can get around it but it's difficult that's why I really appreciate also the the work of Tutori who are trying to make this very simple, making it very simple for you to actually attach a license to anything you produce. So yes I think people are but I mean I can tell you certainly from the kind of normal people I know around here it's very hard to talk to anyone about OER because they don't actually know what I see, I see, yeah there's this in fact and this relates I think to the question Sandra is making again to all of you she's asking what do you think are the obstacles to have OERs as a mainstream? Maybe Cynthia do you want to answer? Martin? I don't know if Martin is there. In my view if I can give a feedback to this question in my view actually in my experience in my environment in Italy there's a cultural obstacle I think. As I said we we don't have so much support from from the government they started a program especially for for schools where they try to support the use of technology so it's a wide program and not so much specifically specifically focused on OERs or MOOCs and so you know it can be distracting again. We have huge problems still with the basic you know network facilities so we have schools and universities with difficulties in connection so these are big big problems and there's not a structured institutional support so as also Martin was was mentioning before there are huge costs on you know individuals on individual teachers or when you know it's possible on on individual departments or schools which have to invest in terms of of course of finances but also of time as as Martin and you yourself were were mentioning it's not an easy situation another thing we should do is a sort of training for for teachers and lecturers also at university level because not so many teachers are acquainted with what OERs are and how they can they can use it and you know students as I we told you about students in our department were not acquainted at all on what was a MOOC or an OER but it's even worse with some teachers and lecturers so I think that that obstacles are also related about knowledge about communication on this kind of opportunities which I think are very important opportunities I don't know if you Martin or Chintia or Dominic you want to add something on Dominic please and then Martin okay yeah I think I covered a few of my presentation I think the other thing I guess is it's not clear what the problem is that they're solving a lot of academics I think that's why in the US the kind of open textbook which approaches got some traction because it's a very simple problem which is solving student costs around textbook and it's not very interesting problems the only thing is kind of once you've solved it where you go there so people now are going to talk about open pedagogy but I think often educators it's like you know what is I'm going to be able to do better I think we I think in the OER community we can work much better on that kind of pitch because often it's fairly vague you know it's an altruistic thing or it will help you with open pedagogy or but I think it's often it's a bit of a delayed benefit I think is it when there's a very specific benefit that we can give to people for use and that kind of helps yeah I'm sure I'm sure Dominic you want to add something I agree with that and I actually think that in a way this question what is the obstacle to OER getting into the mainstream is the wrong way around it's actually more about what can OER do within the mainstream and I think this is a bit of exactly as Martin said this is a bit of the point that's why I was saying for Germany it's it's going to be within the digital agenda I think that OER is really going to come to get its full potential because otherwise the digital agenda just means getting a whole load of computers into classrooms which is which is a very very poor way of developing for the future so you need to think about new ways of teaching and learning and then through that you have to you can use OER to develop this potential so I think it's more about it's not an obstacle to getting into the mainstream it's more what does the mainstream want from OER yeah I have one question myself for Chintia I know we don't have so much time but this last question for for Chintia I was wondering when you were telling us about the Chinese perspective and situation if you have knowledge of which kind of sources do teachers preferably use do you use international OERs or you focus mainly on own production? I think actually the OER users in China prefer to use the resources in Chinese because you know language and the culture is very you know it's very difficult very difficult for some normal teachers and actually at the present our institute is working on finding some ways to solve such problems about language for example we connected with the Foreign Language Association in China and they are established by different foreign language universities in China and they would like to give us some support to solve the problems of language you know we are working on establishing some platform of OER for the Belt and Europe countries and the Belt and Europe countries included in many countries with different languages and especially for some small languages like Serbia and something like that so we need some foreign language experts to give us support to make some at least we make some brief instruction for some resources in different languages and so that the users can search them and using some local engine yeah and I also want to you know talk about something related to Sandra's question you know yeah you know I just talked about in my presentation that we have many challenges when we try to develop the OER in China but I think the most important one is about the awareness you know in China actually the teachers they would like to use educational resources in their teaching actually they already use them every day because many of the resources are made by you know by some and there's some funding of government and we have some repositories of OER established by government and permit using for free so actually the teachers use them every day but they didn't realize that they are using OER because they don't know what is OER you know so they also like from awareness of open license they don't know how to correctly use the open license to to to knock the resources they provided so this is what I want to say I think the increase the value of OER is very important in China and it's one of the difficulties to make the OER as a mainstream but it's the same thing in Italy too so you know it's really what I think is it's the main issue to disseminate and to let you know everyone of course and most of all those working within the educational environment the culture of OER as I told you our idea to train our students will be educators in in some time in this kind of field was a main objective now they know about it they know what OERs and what MOOCs are and they they would use it in their teaching in their future teaching and learning so you need to start bottom up in my view what is Dominique you want to add something I agree with you I mean I think I think we all agree then that this thing of bringing top down and bottom up together is really really important yeah it's important absolutely so I think how we ran out of time we can you know and hear our webinar first of all I would like to thank you all to Intia, Martin and Dominique for participating and giving us these different views and different international views on on the subject we all are interested in I thank you so much I forgot to tell you that besides teaching at Roma Traia University in Italy I also chaired the NEP and the network of academics and professionals within the Eden and so I would like you to to to have a look at our events and possibilities and to take part in our network as we did today very very important thank you all for participating bye bye